Quotes from Theodore Roosevelt

Life is a great adventure…accept it in such a spirit.

It is impossible to win the great prizes of life without running risks, and the greatest of all prizes are those connected with the home.

There is a delight in the hardy life of the open.

The light has gone out of my life.

Death is always, under all circumstances, a tragedy, for if it is not then it means that life has become one.

It pays no matter what comes after it, to try and do things, to accomplish things in this life and not merely to have a soft and pleasant time.

The performance of duty, and not an indulgence in vapid ease and vapid pleasure, is all that makes life worth while.

The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.

Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

The boy who is going to make a great man must not make up his mind merely to overcome a thousand obstacles, but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats.

To borrow a simile from the football field, we believe that men must play fair, but that there must be no shirking, and that the success can only come to the player who hits the line hard.

As regards the extraordinary prizes, the element of luck is the determining factor.

There can be no life without change, and to be afraid of what is different or unfamiliar is to be afraid of life.

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

The lives of truest heroism are those in which there are no great deeds to look back upon. It is the little things well done that go to make up a truly successful and good life.

The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer.

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind.

Let us remember that, as much has been given us, much will be expected from us, and that true homage comes from the heart as well as from the lips, and shows itself in deeds.

There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us... It is not having been in the Dark House, but having left it, that counts.

The world wants the kind of men who do not shrink from temporary defeats in life; but come again and wrestle triumph from defeat.

I enter a most earnest plea that in our hurried and rather bustling life of today we do not lose the hold that our forefathers had on the Bible.

While my interest in natural history has added very little to my sum of achievement, it has added immeasurably to my sum of enjoyment in life.