Emotions and Feelings

As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate.

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

If you hate your enemies, you will contract such a vicious habit of mind, as by degrees will break out upon those who are your friends, or those who are indifferent to you.

Hatred is the vice of narrow souls; they feed it with all their littlenesses, and make it the pretext of base tyrannies.

What a sad era when it is easier to smash an atom than a prejudice.

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence.

He is one of those orators of whom it was well said, ‘Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they sit down they do not know what they have said.’

There is nothing in the record of the past two years when both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republican Party which can lead any person to believe that those promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line—no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.

Failure is the true test of greatness.

It is the privilege of greatness to confer intense happiness with insignificant gifts.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

True greatness is free, kind, familiar, and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.

Greatness is a road that leads toward something unknown.

One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.

The future is a convenient place for dreams.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

To let friendship die away by negligence and silence is certainly not wise. It is voluntarily to throw away one of the greatest comforts of this weary pilgrimage.

Friends do not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.