100 Theodore Roosevelt Quotes About Life and Failure
- Theodore Roosevelt Quotes -
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was born on October 27, 1858, and died on January 6, 1919. He was often referred to as Teddy or his initials T. R., served as the 26th president of the United States from 1901 to 1909.
He still remains the youngest person to ever become the president of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt is generally ranked as one of the five best presidents in the United States.
He was a great writer, a prolific author, writing with passion on subjects ranging from foreign policy to the importance of the national park system.
As a result of his writing prowess, Theodore Roosevelt's quotes were coined from his words which inspired the world.
We’ve been able to gather some of the quotes we believe will be an inspiration
Quotes by Theodore Roosevelt
Listed below are some of Theodore Roosevelt's quotes;
1. “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
2. “Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”
3. “It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.”
4. “The only man who never makes mistakes is the man who never does anything.”
5. “When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.”
6. “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
7. “Courage is not having the strength to go on; it is going on when you don’t have the strength.”
8. “I am a part of everything that I have read.”
9. “Knowing what’s right doesn’t mean much unless you do what’s right.”
10. “Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.”
Theodore Roosevelt’s Famous Quotes
11. “To educate a person in the mind but not in morals is to educate a menace to society.”
12. “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The worst thing you can do is nothing.”
13. “Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.”
14. “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”
15. “A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.”
16. “Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell ’em, ‘Certainly I can!’ Then get busy and find out how to do it.”
17. “Never throughout history has a man who lived a life of ease left a name worth remembering.”
18. “When you play, play hard; when you work, don’t play at all.”
19. “It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.”
20. “People ask the difference between a leader and a boss. The leader leads, and the boss drives.”
Theodore Roosevelt Quotes on Life
21. “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.”
22. “Let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.”
23. “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.”
24. “The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.”
25. “With self-discipline, almost anything is possible.”
26. “The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.”
27. “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.”
28. “Big jobs usually go to the men who prove their ability to outgrow small ones.”
29. “Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.”
30. “Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.”
Teddy Quotes on Criticism
31. “Courtesy is as much a mark of a gentleman as courage.”
32. “I care not what others think of what I do, but I care very much about what I think of what I do! That is character!”
33. “No man is worth his salt who is not ready at all times to risk his well-being, to risk his body, to risk his life, in a great cause.”
34. “This country has nothing to fear from the crooked man who fails. We put him in jail. It is the crooked man who succeeds who is a threat to this country.”
35. “A stream cannot rise larger than its source.”
36. “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.”
37. “If I must choose between peace and righteousness, I choose righteousness.”
38. “Peace is normally a great good, and normally it coincides with righteousness, but it is righteousness and not peace which should bind the conscience of a nation as it should bind the conscience of an individual; and neither a nation nor an individual can surrender conscience to another’s keeping.”
39. “All the resources we need are in the mind.”
40. “Our chief usefulness to humanity rests on our combining power with high purpose. Power undirected by high purpose spells calamity, and high purpose by itself is utterly useless if the power to put it into effect is lacking.”
Teddy Quotes on Mistakes
41. “There is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.”
42. “In life, as in a football game, the principle to follow is: hit the line hard.”
43. “The men and women who have the right ideals… are those who have the courage to strive for the happiness which comes only with labor and effort and self-sacrifice, and those whose joy in life springs in part from power of work and sense of duty.”
44. “We need the iron qualities that go with true manhood. We need the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shrinking the rough work that must always be done.”
45. “At some time in our lives a devil dwells within us, causes heartbreaks, confusion and troubles, then dies.”
46. “We must remember not to judge any public servant by any one act, and especially should we beware of attacking the men who are merely the occasions and not the cause of disaster.”
47. “Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.”
48. “Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.”
49. “Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.”
50. “A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterward. More than that no man is entitled, and less than that no man shall have.”
Quote Theodore Roosevelt
51. “I have always said I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.”
52. “It was here that the romance of my life began.”
53. “I grow very fond of this place, and it certainly has a desolate, grim beauty of its own, that has a curious fascination for me.”
54. “The Bad Lands grade all the way from those that are almost rolling in character to those that are so fantastically broken in form and so bizarre in color as to seem hardly properly to belong to this earth.”
55. “Rattlesnakes are only too plentiful everywhere; along the river bottoms, in the broken, hilly ground, and on the prairies and the great desert wastes alike…If it can it will get out of the way, and only coils up in its attitude of defense when it believes that it is actually menaced.”
56. “One of our sweetest, loudest songsters is the meadowlark the air of the plains seems to give it a voice, and it will perch on the top of a bush or tree and sing for hours in rich, bubbling tones.”
57. “They have a funny habit of gravely bowing or posturing at the passer-by, and stand up very erect on their legs.” — Theodore Roosevelt Quotes on burrowing owls
58. “Magpies are birds that catch the eye at once from their bold black and white plumage and long tails; and they are very saucy and at the same time very cunning and shy.”
59. “One bleak March day,…a flock of snow-buntings came…Every few moments one of them would mount into the air, hovering about with quivering wings and warbling a loud, merry song with some very sweet notes. They were a most welcome little group of guests, and we were sorry when, after loitering around a day or two, they disappeared toward their breeding haunts.”
60. “In a great many-indeed, in most-localities there are wild horses to be found, which, although invariably of domestic descent, being either themselves runaways from some ranch or Indian outfit, or else claiming such for their sires and dams, yet are quite as wild as the antelope on whose domain they have intruded.”
Theodore Roosevelt Quote
61. “Prairie dogs are abundant; they are in shape like little woodchucks and are the noisiest and inquisitive animals imaginable. They are never found singly, but always in towns of several hundred inhabitants; and these towns are found in all kinds of places where the country is flat and treeless.”
62. “Around the prairie-dog towns it is always well to keep a look-out for the smaller Carnivora, especially coyotes and badgers…and for the larger kinds of hawks. Rattlesnakes are quite plenty, living in the deserted holes, and the latter are also the homes of the little burrowing owls.”
63. “The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world.”
64. “The river flows in long sigmoid curves through an alluvial valley of no great width. The amount of this alluvial land enclosed by a single bend is called a bottom, which may be either covered with cotton-wood trees or else be simply a great grass meadow. From the edges of the valley the land rises abruptly in steep high buttes whose crests are sharp and jagged. This broken country extends back from the river for many miles, and has been called always, by Indians, French voyageurs, and American trappers alike, the “Bad Lands”…”
65. “Life is a great adventure…accept it in such a spirit.”
66. “My home ranch lies on both sides of the Little Missouri, the nearest ranch man above me being about twelve, and the nearest below me about ten, miles distant.”
67. “The story-high house of hewn logs is clean and neat, with many rooms, so that one can be alone if one wishes to.”
68. “Rough board shelves hold a number of books, without which some of the evenings would be long indeed.”
69. “I do not believe there ever was any life more attractive to a vigorous young fellow than life on a cattle ranch in those days. It was a fine, healthy life, too; it taught a man self-reliance, hardihood, and the value of instant decision…I enjoyed the life to the full.”
70. “This broken country extends back from the river for many miles and has been called always be Indian, French voyager and American trappers alike, the Bad Lands.”
Quotes by Theodore Roosevelt
71. “Nothing could be more lonely and nothing more beautiful than the view at nightfall across the prairies to these huge hill masses, when the lengthening shadows had at last merged into one and the faint after-glow of the red sunset filled the west.”
72. “The beauty and charm of the wilderness are his for the asking, for the edges of the wilderness lie close beside the beaten roads of the present travel.”
73. “I heartily enjoy this life, with its perfect freedom, for I am very fond of hunting, and there are few sensations I prefer to that of galloping over these rolling limitless prairies, with rifle in hand, or winding my way among the barren, fantastic and grimly picturesque deserts of the so-called Bad Lands…”
74. “its toughness and hardy endurance fitted it to contend with purely natural forces…to resist cold and wintery blasts or the heat of the thirsty summer, to wander away to new pastures, to plunge over the broken ground, and to plow its way through snowdrifts or quagmires.”
75. “There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm.”
76. “Sometimes we vary our diet with fish — wall-eyed pike, ugly slimy catfish, and other uncouth finny things looking very fit denizens of the mud-choked water…”
77. “After nightfall the face of the country seems to alter marvelously, and the clear moonlight only intensifies the change. The river gleams like running quicksilver, and the moonbeams play over the grassy stretches of the plateaus…The Bad Lands seem to be stranger and wilder than ever, the silvery rays turning the country into a kind of grim fairyland.”
78. “Water is a commodity not by any means to be found everywhere…When found, it is more than likely to be bad, being either from a bitter alkaline pool or from a hole in a creek, so muddy that it can only be called liquid by courtesy.”
79. “…lands, where the ground is roughest, and where there is some cover, even though scattered and scanty, are the best places to find the black-tail [mule deer].”
80. “The little owls call to each other with tremulous, quavering voices throughout the livelong night, as they sit in the creaking trees.”
Theodore Roosevelt Man in the Arena Quote
81. “Now and then we hear the wilder voices of the wilderness, from animals that in the hours of darkness do not fear the neighborhood of man: the coyotes wail like dismal ventriloquists, or the silence may be broken by the snorting and stamping of a deer.”
82. “Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains; and after a man has lived a little while on or near them, their very vastness and loneliness and their melancholy monotony have a strong fascination for him.”
83. “At nightfall the poor-wills begin to utter their boding call from the wooded ravines back in the hills; not the “whip-poor-will,” as in the East, but with two syllables only.”
84. “The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.”
85. “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.”
86. “It is an incalculable added pleasure to any one’s sum of happiness if he or she grows to know, even slightly and imperfectly, how to read and enjoy the wonder-book of nature.”
87. “The joy of living is his who has the heart to demand it.”
88. “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.”
89. “We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so.”
90. “I do not believe that any man can adequately appreciate the world of to-day unless he has some knowledge of — a little more than a slight knowledge, some feeling for and of — the history of the world of the past.”
Theodore Roosevelt Daring Greatly Quote
91. “wild flowers should be enjoyed unplucked where they grow.”
92. “The lack of power to take joy in outdoor nature is as real a misfortune as the lack of power to take joy in books.”
93. “There can be nothing in the world more beautiful than the Yosemite, the groves of the giant sequoias and redwoods, the Canyon of the Colorado, the Canyon of the Yellowstone, the Three Tetons; and our people should see to it that they are preserved for their children and their children’s children forever, with their majestic beauty all unmarred.”
94. “It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.”
95. “It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man.”
96. “A grove of giant redwood or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral.”
97. “In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. I want to ask you to keep this great wonder of nature as it now is. I hope you will not have a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel or anything else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.”
98. “We have become great because of the lavish use of our resources. But the time has come to inquire seriously what will happen when our forests are gone, when the coal, the iron, the oil, and the gas are exhausted, when the soils have still further impoverished and washed into the streams, polluting the rivers, denuding the fields and obstructing navigation.”
99. “I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob, by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.”
100. “Of all the questions which can come before this nation, short of the actual preservation of its existence in a great war, there is none which compares in importance with the great central task of leaving this land even a better land for our descendants than it is for us.”
Keep the hope alive and never quit dreaming. Please share with your loved ones and friends.
CSN Team.
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Originally published at https://www.currentschoolnews.com on March 8, 2022.