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

by Eleanor Roosevelt

When you stop learning you stop living in any vital and meaningful sense.

There is no human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.

The encouraging thing is that every time you meet a situation, though you may think at the time it is an impossibility and you go through the tortures of the damned, once you have met it and lived through it you find that forever after you are freer than you ever were before. If you can live through that you can live through anything. You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.

You are able to say to yourself, “I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.”

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.

So it is a major part of maturity to accept not only your own shortcomings but those of the people you love, and help them not to fail when you can.

Maturity means, too, an ability to take criticism and evaluate it.

Every age, someone has said, is an undiscovered country. We are constantly advancing, like explorers, into the unknown, which makes life an adventure all the way.

No relationship in this world ever remains warm and close unless a real effort is made on both sides to keep it so.

Mutual respect is the basis of all civilized human relationships. It is necessary in the family group, it is inseparable from friendship, it is a requirement in the work one does with one’s associates on whatever level, and it is increasingly necessary in seeking co-operation among the peoples of the world.

As a people, I am afraid, we tend too often to brush aside with impatience, sometimes with discourtesy, customs and points of view which are alien to us.

WE ALL create the person we become by our choices as we go through life. In a very real sense, by the time we are adult, we are the sum total of the choices we have made.

There is no human growth without the acceptance of responsibility

Unless indoctrinated, a child is too logical to understand discrimination.