Book Quotes — You Learn by Living by Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleven Keys for a more fulfilling life.

1. Learning to Learn

2. Fear — the Great Enemy

• Timidity and shyness are fears.
• Do the things that interest you ad do them with all your heart. Don’t be concerned about whether people are watching you or criticizing you. The chances are they aren’t paying any attention to you. It's your attention to yourself that is so stultifying.
• How do you recover from a disaster? You do it by meeting it and going on.
• Little by little I found out how to do things. Every time you meet a crisis and live through it, you make it simpler for the next time. We don’t 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.

3. The Uses of Time

• First of my own personal requirements is inner calm. The ability to attain this inner calm, regardless of outside turmoil, is a kind of strength. It saves an immense amount of wear and on the nervous system.
• Learn to concentrate, to give all your attention to the thing at hand, and then to be able to put it aside and go on to the next thing without confusion. You can finish any task much quicker if you concentrate on it for 15 minutes than if you give it divided attention for thirty.
• Feel responsibility for keeping myself in good health. Simple rules of hygiene, of adequate diet, and of periodical check0ups, that would enable them to get so much more out of living because of the upsurge of energy which they would feel. Essential for your well being to regulate your life and your habits in a sensible way.
• Age needs the company of youth. The most unhappy people in the world are those who face the days without knowing what to do with their time. This is as much a question of having imagination and curiosity as it is of actually making plans. Things will come to you if you have an interest in the first place.
• No one can tell you how to use your time. it is yours. your life is your own. You mould it. you make it. Find out what you want to do with your life.

4. The difficult Art of maturity

• A mature person is one who does not think only in absolutes, who is able to be objective even when deeply stirred emotionally, who has learned that there is both good and bad in all people and in all things, and who walks humbly and deals charitably with the circumstances of life, knowing that in this world all of us need both love and charity.
• You must try to understand truthfully what makes you do things or feel things. It takes courage to face yourself and to acknowledge what motivates you in the things you do.
• Without self-respect, few people are able to feel genuine respect for others. What is freely given in love or affection or companionship one should rightly rejoice in. but what is withheld one must not demand.
• This kind of demand is a form of spiritual blackmail and it sometimes develops into a ruthlessness, an emotional pressure which is essentially dishonest. They regard themselves, neglected, they are attempting to get by force something that people are unwilling to give them. If they refused to correct this tendency, then at least their victims must learn to resist steadily and firmly the assaults of this spiritual blackmailer.
• Maturity also means that you have set your values, that you know what you really want out of life. It is in being with people I am fond of and feeling that in some small way I can make life happier or more interesting for them or help them to achieve their objectives. What has value for them? meet no real needs of their own. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one's own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

5. Readjustment is Endless

• I discovered that by keeping as busy as possible I could manage increasingly to keep my loneliness at bay.

6. Learning To be Useful

• Happiness is not a goal, it is a by-product.
• 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.
• A child who feels the basic acceptance that goes with respect, and knows he is trusted because he is accepted, will achieve remarkable ability in acquiring self-control and consideration for others.
• 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. For you are needed. Desperately.

7. The Right To be an individual

• As frequently as not, they don’t really want what the Joneses wanted, they are different people with different tastes and values.
• your ambition should be to get as much life out of living as you possibly can, as much enjoyment, as much interest, as much experience, as much understanding. Not simply to be what is generally called a success.
• To leave the world richer- that is the ultimate success.
• If you live what you believe, your children will believe it. These people aren’t trying to keep up with anything but their own standards. They are satisfied with the things they have because they get real enjoyment from them.
• This is your life, not someone else’s it is your own feeling, of what is important, not what people will say. 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 ad actions, making them completely alien to you.
• The house should be the product of your own personality. The furniture should suit your way o life, the pictures are pictures you love, the colours be the ones you enjoy. If you call in a decorator and say please do this room, without expressing any likes or dislikes of your own, you have abdicated any expression of your personality. You must have a certain confidence in your own taste.
• You have to learn to live with yourself. Are you going to feel you have weakened yourself as a person because you didn’t stand for something you thought was fundamentally right?

8. How to get the best out of people

• It is only by inducing others to go along that changes are accomplished and work is done.
• Mutual respect is the basis of all civilized human relationships. It is necessary for the family group, it is inseparable from friendship, it is a requirement in the work one does with one's associates on whatever level.
• Unexpected qualities and interest which you will unearth in your search for treasure. But the treasure is there if you will mine for it.
• We need all the friendship, all the support, we can get. But they have to be earned.

9. Facing Responsibility

• We al 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. every single one of us must be responsible for himself and for his actions.
• Enable the individual to stand on his own feet.
• Sometimes people cling to this outside assistance, reluctant to let go of the support and stand-alone. The kind of self-reliance I have in mind goes farther than mere responsibility for oneself. Each of us, ultimately, is responsible in large part for the welfare of his community, for the kind of government he has, for the world he lives in.
• With freedom comes responsibility. For the person who is unwilling to grow up, the person who does not want to carry his own weight, this is a frightening prospect.
• When someone else guides them, makes their decisions for them, takes the responsibility for them and for their actions. they don't want to make up their minds. They don’t want to stand on their own feet. Too little attention is paid to passive sins, such as apathy and laziness. Face full responsibility for their actions, to make their own choices and cope with the results.
• The responsibility has come to each of us to work out for ourselves what we believe to be right or wrong. We have to learn to think things through for ourselves
• There is no human growth without the acceptance of responsibility and I think it should be developed as soon as it reasonably can be. How is the money to be spent? this is one of the most vital problems to be solved in any family and it is one of the most far-reaching. It determines where your basic values lie: what do you want in exchange for the money you earn?
• Financial planning should be a part of family life and it should start from the very beginning. For the bulk of the people of this country, all the income is derived from the salaries of one or at most two members of the family. The first step is that financial planning is to make a clear and honest evaluation of what you want to have, not just in things, but in the way of living itself.
• Food, shelter, clothing, medical protection, education, recreation — one comes face to face with what one wants not simply out of money but out of life.

10. How everyone can take part in politics

• 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?

I’d like to pass this book to Ines Azevedo