You Learn by Living: Eleven Keys for a More Fulfilling Life

by Eleanor Roosevelt

One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes.

Nothing alive can stand still, it goes forward or back. Life is interesting only as long as it is a process of growth; or, to put it another way, we can grow only as long as we are interested.

What counts, in the long run, is not what you read; it is what you sift through your own mind; it is the ideas and impressions that are aroused in you by your reading. It is the ideas stirred in your own mind, the ideas which are a reflection of your own thinking, which make you an interesting person.

Knowing my own deficiencies, I made a game of trying to make people talk about whatever they were interested in and learning as much as I could about their particular subject. After a while I had acquired a certain technique for picking their brains. It was not only great fun but I began to get an insight into many subjects I could not possibly have learned about in any other way. And, best of all, I discovered vast fields of knowledge and experience that I had hardly guessed existed.

There is a wonderful word, why?, that children use. All children. When they stop using it, the reason, too often, is that no one bothered to answer them, no one tried to keep alive one of the most important attributes a person can have: interest in the world around him. No one fostered and cultivated the child’s innate sense of the adventure of life. One of the things I believe most intensely is that every child’s why should be answered with care—and with respect. If you do not know the answer, and you often will not, then take the child with you to a source to find the answer. This may be a dictionary or encyclopedia which he is too young to use himself, but he will have had a sense of participation in finding the answer.

the discipline one imposes on oneself is the only sure bulwark one has against fear.

withholding of information from a child either frustrates him or makes him seek it for himself. And the trouble with the latter method is that it is apt to make the child feel both guilty and dishonest.

The danger lies in refusing to face the fear, in not daring to come to grips with it. If you fail anywhere along the line it will take away your confidence. You must make yourself succeed every time. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

Our doubts are traitors And make us lose the good we oft might win By fearing to attempt.

I discovered, as everyone has to discover, sooner or later, that either I must learn how to deal with situations or I must go down in defeat, terrified at the possibility that something would happen.

“When you have said what you have to say—sit down.”

Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.

We have all the time there is. The problem is: How shall we make the best use of it? There are three ways in which I have been able to solve that problem: first, by achieving an inner calm so that I can work undisturbed by what goes on around me; second, by concentrating on the thing in hand; third, by arranging a routine pattern for my days that allots certain activities to certain hours, planning in advance for everything that must be done, but at the same time remaining flexible enough to allow for the unexpected. There is a fourth point which, perhaps, plays a considerable part in the use of my time. I try to maintain a general pattern of good health so that I have the best use of my energy whenever I need it.

Inflexibility will make your life an unnecessary burden and it will also make it dull. Worst of all, it will make you a burden to other people.

I have only two remedies for weariness: one is change and the other is relaxation.

I think almost anyone would agree that unless time is good for something it is good for nothing.

There is another ingredient of the maturing process that is almost as painful as accepting your own limitations and the knowledge of what you are unable to give. That is learning to accept what other people are unable to give you. You must learn not to demand the impossible or to be upset when you do not get it.

Just as we must learn to accept the limitations of others, so we must learn never to demand of someone else what is not freely offered us.

Readjustment is a kind of private revolution. Each time you learn something new you must readjust the whole framework of your knowledge. It seems to me that one is forced to make inner and outer readjustments all one’s life. The process never ends.

Someone once asked me what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer was: “A feeling that you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling that you have done the best you could both in your personal life and in your work; and the ability to love others.”

To be useful is, in a way, to justify one’s own existence. The difficult thing, perhaps, is to learn how to be useful, to recognize needs and to attempt to meet them. Most people encounter this need first in the family group where, if the family is really a closely knit unit, they learn to carry their share of the responsibility for the family. They meet it next in the most difficult relationship of all, marriage, where each must learn for himself to understand his partner, to know what his needs are, and to meet them with unselfishness and flexibility. They meet it next when they discover that their home is part of a community and that community a part of a larger society whose limits are increasingly wide. Someday, perhaps, they will be world-wide. The needs of that community, of that society, are endless, beyond calculation. If you can learn to see where they are, you will find, at the same time, a way to be useful.

No real harm was done and I learned again the lesson that you fear in apprehension far more than you actually suffer in reality.

I am inclined to think that being a success is tied up very closely with being one’s own kind of individual.

Remember always that you have not only the right to be an individual; you have an obligation to be one. You cannot make any useful contribution in life unless you do this.

“Anxiety,” Kierkegaard said, “is the dizziness of freedom.”