Theodore Roosevelt Inspirational Quotes: 100+ Powerful Words to Inspire Courage

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

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.

Courage and resolution are as contagious as cowardice and panic.

Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.

We must show, not merely in great crises but in every day life, the qualities of practical intelligence, of hardihood and endurance, and above all the resolute courage which refuses to be daunted by danger.

There is a homely old adage which runs: Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.

Do not hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft.

It behooves us to remember that the men who succeeded best in war were not the men who declaimed against it, but the men who fought.

Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive.

No man is above the law and no man is below it: nor do we ask any man’s permission when we require him to obey it.

The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it.

This country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.

There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the President or any other public official.

A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.

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.

There are good men and bad men of all nationalities, creeds and colors; and if this world of ours is ever to become what we hope some day it may become, it must be by the general recognition that the man’s heart and soul, the man’s worth and actions, determine his standing.

Character, in the long run, is the decisive factor in the life of an individual and of nations alike.

It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed.

The only man who never makes a mistake is the man who never does anything.

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.

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.

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.

If a man does not have an ideal and try to live up to it, then he becomes a mean, base and sordid creature, no matter how successful.

It is only through labor and painful effort, by grim energy and resolute courage, that we move on to better things.

There has never yet been a man in our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.

Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.

Believe you can and you’re halfway there.

Get action, do things; be sane; don’t fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action.

Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.

When you play, play hard; when you work, don’t play at all.

I am only an average man but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man.

Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.

A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.

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.

I have always said I would not have been President had it not been for my experience in North Dakota.

It was here that the romance of my life began.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm.

After nightfall the face of the country seems to alter marvelously, and the clear moonlight only intensifies the change.

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.

Nowhere, not even at sea, does a man feel more lonely than when riding over the far-reaching, seemingly never-ending plains.

The farther one gets into the wilderness, the greater is the attraction of its lonely freedom.

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.

The joy of living is his who has the heart to demand it.

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.

Wild flowers should be enjoyed unplucked where they grow.

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.

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.

It was like lying in a great solemn cathedral, far vaster and more beautiful than any built by the hand of man.

A grove of giant redwood or sequoias should be kept just as we keep a great and beautiful cathedral.

In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which is in kind absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest of the world. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.

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

All life in the wilderness is so pleasant that the temptation is to consider each particular variety, while one is enjoying it, as better than any other.

Spring would not be spring without bird songs, any more than it would be spring without buds and flowers.

And to lose the chance to see frigatebirds soaring in circles above the storm, or a file of pelicans winging their way homeward across the crimson afterglow of the sunset, why, the loss is like the loss of a gallery of the masterpieces of the artists of old time.

We are prone to speak of the resources of this country as inexhaustible; this is not so.

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.

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.

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.

It is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird.

The extermination of the buffalo has been a veritable tragedy of the animal world.

It is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty-first, the love of soft living, and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

There is no moral difference between gambling at cards or in lotteries or on the racetrack and gambling in the stock market.

I do not believe that any man can adequately appreciate the world of to-day unless he has some knowledge of the history of the world of the past.

Every man owes a part of his time and money to the business or industry in which he is engaged.

Ours is a government of liberty by, through, and under the law.

My home ranch-house stands on the river brink. From the low, long veranda, shaded by leafy cotton-woods, one looks across sand bars and shallows to a strip of meadowland, behind which rises a line of sheer cliffs and grassy plateaus.

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.

The story-high house of hewn logs is clean and neat, with many rooms, so that one can be alone if one wishes to.

Rough board shelves hold a number of books, without which some of the evenings would be long indeed.

In a great many localities there are wild horses to be found, which, although invariably of domestic descent, yet are quite as wild as the antelope on whose domain they have intruded.

Prairie-dogs are abundant; they are in shape like little woodchucks, and are the most noisy and inquisitive animals imaginable.

One of our sweetest, loudest songsters is the meadow-lark, and it will perch on the top of a bush or tree and sing for hours in rich, bubbling tones.

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.