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

by Eleanor Roosevelt

I honor the human race. When it faces life head-on, it can almost remake itself.

What I have learned from my own experience is that the most important ingredients in a child’s education are curiosity, interest, imagination, and a sense of the adventure of life.

You will find no courses in which these are taught; and

yet they are the qualities that make all learning rewarding, that make all life zestful, that make us seek constantly for new experience and deeper understanding. They are also the qualities that enable us to continue to grow as human beings to the last day of our life, and to continue to learn. By learning, of course, I mean a great deal more than so-called formal education. Nobody can learn all he needs to know. Education provides the necessary tools, equipment by which we learn how to learn. The object of all our education and all the deve...

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.

I had to learn to face people and I could not do it so long as I was obsessed with fears about myself, which is the usual situation with shyness. I learned a liberating thing. If you will forget about yourself, whether or not you are making a good impression on people, what they think of you, and you will think about them instead, you won’t be shy. Do the things that interest you and do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are that they aren’t paying any attention to you.

It’s your attention to yourself that is so stultifying.

I haven’t ever believed that anything supported by fear can stand against freedom from fear.

knowledge. One must be willing to have knowledge of oneself. You have to be honest with yourself. You must try to understand truthfully what makes you do things or feel things. Until you have been able to face the truth about yourself you cannot be really sympathetic or understanding in regard to what happens to other people. But it takes courage to face yourself and to acknowledge what motivates you in the things you do.

The knowledge of how little you can do alone teaches you humility. No matter how much adulation may come your way, once you really understand your limitations you are able to sit and listen to praise and feel quite detached, as though you were looking at the picture of someone else.

It is easy for us to be quite misled about ourselves, about our bad qualities as well as our good. And it is impossible to proceed with the right motives instead of the wrong ones as long as we have any serious misconception about ourselves. If you have established the right motives it will help you greatly in assessing other people. You can never do this on a sound basis while you are deceived in regard to yourself.

the person who has followed his true bent has more self-respect than the one who has been forced into an alien mold. And without self-respect, few people are able to feel genuine respect for others.

Maturity means, too, an ability to take criticism and evaluate it. When it is not of value, when it is not constructive, but destructive, one can forget it. But when it is constructive one must accept it and try to profit, even though hurt by it.

you are mature enough, you will accept the criticism of those you love and who love you and learn from it.

Another sign of maturity is gradually to eliminate the faults you see in yourself but that no one else knows exist. If no one else is conscious of a failing we have, a great many of us are apt to hide it instead of trying to eliminate it.

To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own.

WOMEN have one advantage over men. Throughout history they have been forced to make adjustments. They have adapted their own personal wishes and ambitions and hopes to those of their husbands, their children, and the requirements of their homes. In the great majority, they have arranged to fit their own interests into a pattern primarily concerned with the interests of others. This has not always been an easy process but the result is that, in most cases, it is less difficult for a woman to adjust to new situations than it is for a man.

Readjustment is a kind of private revolution.

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. How interminable and dull that journey would be if it were on a straight road over a flat plain, if we could see ahead the whole distance, without surprises, without the salt of the unexpected, without challenge. I wish with all my heart that every child could be so imbued with a sense of the adventure of life that each change, each readjustment, each surprise—good or bad—that came along would be welcomed as a part of the whole enthralling experience.

But I am inclined to believe that for men the aging process is more painful than for women, who learned so young to adjust. For a man who has been accustomed to have people dependent on him, the decline of the period of dominance, the approach of the period of dependence, is a hard situation to face.

When you know you have no justification for self-pity and you want to pity yourself it is much worse than if you have a real grievance.

Whatever period of life we are in is good only to the extent that we make use of it, that we live it to the hilt, that we continue to develop and understand what it has to offer us and we have to offer it. The rewards for each age are different in kind, but they are not necessarily different in value or in satisfaction.

Unhappiness is an inward, not an outward, thing. It is as independent of circumstances as is happiness. Consider the truly happy people you know. I think it is unlikely that you will find that circumstances have made them happy. They have made themselves happy in spite of circumstances.

Usefulness, whatever form it may take, is the price we should pay for the air we breathe and the food we eat and the privilege of being alive.

For each of us our load of trouble is our personal burden to carry, not something to be sloughed off on someone else. Also, and it’s a curious thing, if you don’t make a parade of your unhappiness to someone else, you’ll find it is a lot easier to get over it.

Usefulness, to my mind, is a kind of blanket word that covers all the many kinds of service to one’s fellow men. It is an expression of human love. Or, instead of love, perhaps the better word would be respect.

Love can often be misguided and do as much harm as good, but respect can do only good. It assumes that the other person’s stature is as large as one’s own, his rights as reasonable, his needs as important.

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.

this is the worst part of the rather casual desire to be useful. A person sees something that should be done and offers to do it. As time passes, he becomes bored and loses interest; he becomes slack, fails to appear when he had promised to do so, fails to accomplish what he had pledged to do. This kind of amateur “helper” is perhaps more prevalent than one would wish. If you promise to perform something for the good of an individual or an organization or a community, try your best to live up to your word.

It has always seemed to me a great pity that man’s noblest instincts, his heroic self-sacrifice, his capacity to unite with his neighbor in a common cause, emerge only in times of disaster, such as war and fire and flood.

you fear in apprehension far more than you actually suffer in reality.

Too many people have forgotten good manners

Just kindness. A graciousness of manner which avoids hurting another person or making him ill at ease. A graciousness of the heart. But while this kind of conformity seems to me basic in dealing with one’s fellows, it does not imply that you alter your own convictions and conform to theirs.

Sooner or later, you are bound to discover that you cannot please all of the people around you all of the time. Some of them will attribute to you motives you never dreamed of. Some of them will misinterpret your words and actions, making them completely alien to you. So you had better learn fairly early that you must not expect to have everyone understand what you say and what you do.

you must have a certain confidence in your own taste. And here, I think, is the key to much conformity—the lack of self-confidence that makes people fearful of following their own bent.

The constant pressure to bring about conformity is a dangerous thing. People are so bombarded with certain sayings, told so often what they should believe, that sometimes they don’t know what to believe. But they must find out where they stand, make up their own minds what they really think. That is why I am convinced that every effort must be made in childhood to teach the young to use their own minds. For one thing is sure: If they don’t make up their minds, someone will do it for them.

If you are to get along with people, if you are to get the best out of your dealings with them, on whatever level, it is not enough merely to win their confidence. You must be able to estimate the extent to which you succeed in communicating with them.

In group work, it is certainly the better part of wisdom to take the result and let the credit go.

Too many of us feel that any custom which is not our own is ridiculous or essentially wrong, that it is fair game for laughter or contempt. We could make no more devastating or stupid—yes, stupid—mistake. To show a lack of respect for another person’s customs is fatal to any enduring or self-respecting relationship.

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. If the way is not our way it is wrong!

It is not our job to change other people’s customs. It is our job to know what they are and, if possible, to understand them.

Just as all living is adjustment and readjustment, so all choice, to some extent, must be compromise between reality and a dream of perfection. We must try to bring the reality as close to that dream of perfection as we can, but we must not demand of it the impossible. It is only an approximation that anyone can reach, but the closer one tries to approximate it, the more he will grow. If he keeps his dream of perfection and strains toward it, he will come closer to achieving it than if he rejects the reality because it was not perfection.

“How are we going to find out the facts?” people ask me over and over. “We are not afraid of forming our own judgments, but we must have a concrete and reliable body of evidence on which to base it.” Finding the facts—there’s the rub. It seems to me that the mass media do not take as seriously as they should their immense responsibility to keep the people of the country informed. Too often, they present the news scantily and inadequately. They should present two sides of each question so that the people can have a real opportunity to form their own judgments. After all, both sides are news. Of course, if one has infinite leisure or is willing to take time from other interests, one can read widely—newspapers, magazines, books—in an effort to get at the facts, to find out what is actually happening, to weigh the evidence impartially. But if there is not enough time, or the published material is not available, people most frequently turn to the commentators, who play an increasingly important part in shaping the opinions of the voters. Like the newspapers, these men vary widely in the extent of their sources of news, in their experience and integrity in evaluating it, in their contacts with men in high places both in this country and abroad. Their attitude toward their function may be merely that of a gossip relating malicious stories; or that of a propagandist for some particular point of view; or that of an advocate for a certain type of policy; or it may be, and fortunatel...

Such men, like good newspapers, keep separate their facts and their personal commentary.

discuss political matters with people whose opinions differ radically from one’s own. For the same reason, I believe it is a sound idea to attend not only the meetings of one’s own party but of the opposition. Find out what people are saying, what they are thinking, what they believe. This is an invaluable check on one’s own ideas. Are we right in what we think or is there a different approach that might be more effective? Are we clinging to an outmoded theory? Which policy is best for the people, best for our government, best for the world? If we are to cope intelligently with a changing world, we must be flexible and willing to relinquish opinions that no longer have any bearing on existing conditions.

Talking over political problems and theories is useful for a variety of reasons. By having to frame your ideas and beliefs in words, you are forced to crystallize, to clarify them for yourself. Through discussion you can get fresh light on situations and fresh facts about conditions. Above all, you can get the stimulation and challenge of disagreement and learn to test your beliefs and opinions, to re-examine them from a fresh viewpoint. Of course, if you merely defend your opinion without re-examination, any discussion is quite pointless.

It is an unhappy truth that a man entirely dependent on his salary as a public servant is dangerously vulnerable. He is afraid to take risks. He is afraid to do an unpopular thing, even though he may be convinced that it is right. He is sometimes open to deals.