“I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”

—  Eleanor Roosevelt

Last update Sept. 29, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I could never be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity…" by Eleanor Roosevelt?
Eleanor Roosevelt photo
Eleanor Roosevelt 148
American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady… 1884–1962

Related quotes

Eleanor Roosevelt photo

“Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Preface (December 1960) to The Autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt (1961), p. xix

Eleanor Roosevelt photo

“I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

Variant: I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on. Life was meant to be lived.

Eleanor Roosevelt photo

“I think I have a good deal of my Uncle Theodore in me, because I could not, at any age, be content to take my place by the fireside and simply look on.”

Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) American politician, diplomat, and activist, and First Lady of the United States

As quoted in The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America (2002) by James MacGregor Burns ad Susan Dunn, p. 563
Variant: I could not at any age be content to take my place in a corner by the fireside and simply look on.

Anthony de Mello photo

“Whatever is truly alive must die. Look at the flowers; only plastic flowers never die.”

Anthony de Mello (1931–1987) Indian writer

Flow
One Minute Wisdom (1989)

Mohammad Hidayatullah photo

“I was never in the mood of Lord Macaulay who said – I shall retire early I am very tired– I know that life meant that one must continue to occupy his time with work.”

Mohammad Hidayatullah (1905–1992) 11th Chief Justice of India

Speech By Mr. S. G. Page, Government Pleader, High Court, Bombay, Made On Monday, 28 September, 1992

Milan Kundera photo

“Children, Never look Back!" and this meant that we must never allow the future to be weighed down by memory. for children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles.”

Milan Kundera book The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Source: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

George MacDonald photo

“If sin must be kept alive, then hell must be kept alive; but while I regard the smallest sin as infinitely loathsome, I do not believe that any being, never good enough to see the essential ugliness of sin, could sin so as to deserve such punishment. I am not now, however, dealing with the question of the duration of punishment, but with the idea of punishment itself; and would only say in passing, that the notion that a creature born imperfect, nay, born with impulses to evil not of his own generating, and which he could not help having, a creature to whom the true face of God was never presented, and by whom it never could have been seen, should be thus condemned, is as loathsome a lie against God as could find place in heart too undeveloped to understand what justice is, and too low to look up into the face of Jesus.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

From ‘’Justice’’ in Unspoken Sermons Series III (1889)

Ian McEwan photo

“He knew these last lines by heart and mouthed them now in the darkness. My reason for life. Not living, but life. That was the touch. And she was his reason for life, and why he must survive.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

Lucretius photo

“But if one should guide his life by true principles, man's greatest riches is to live on a little with contented mind; for a little is never lacking.”
Quod siquis vera vitam ratione gubernet, divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parvo aequo animo; neque enim est umquam penuria parvi.

Lucretius (-94–-55 BC) Roman poet and philosopher

Quod siquis vera vitam ratione gubernet,
divitiae grandes homini sunt vivere parvo
aequo animo; neque enim est umquam penuria parvi.
Book V, lines 1117–1119 (tr. Rouse)
De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Where had thy life been at this hour,
Had not my Love been more than my Power? —
Away, if thou fearest, — love never must,
Never can live with one shade of distrust.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1825-2) Antony and Cleopatra. An Anecdote from Plutarch
The Monthly Magazine

Related topics