After the discovery in 1918 of love letters revealing that Franklin was involved with Lucy Mercer: The bottom dropped out of my own particular world, I faced myself, my surroundings, my world, honestly for the first time.

There is not human being from whom we cannot learn something if we are interested enough to dig deep.

Success in marriage depends on being able, when you get over being in love, to really love....You never know anyone until you marry them.

It's your life - but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else . . . you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

How hard it is to project oneself into the future. We are always prone to think of the conditions which are with us today as being permanent conditions.

The greatest gift you can give a child is an imagination.

Beautiful old people are works of art.