Fred Rogers - Life Quotes

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When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.

Fred Rogers
My hope for all of us is that 'the miles we go before we sleep' will be filled with all the feelings that come from deep caring--delight, sadness, joy, wisdom--and that in all the endings of our life, we will be able to see the new beginnings.

Fred Rogers
Very early in our children's lives we will be forced to realize that the "perfect" untroubled life we'd like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don't want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.

Fred Rogers
All life events are formative. All contribute to what we become, year by year, as we go on growing. As my friend the poet Kenneth Koch once said, You aren't just the age you are. You are all the ages you ever have been!

Fred Rogers
Who you are inside is what helps you make and do everything in life.

Fred Rogers
The roots of a child's ability to cope and thrive, regardless of circumstance, lie in that child's having had at least a small, safe place (an apartment? a room? a lap?) in which, in the companionship of a loving person, that child could discover that he or she was lovable and capable of loving in return. If a child finds this during the first years of life, he or she can grow up to be a competent, healthy person.

Fred Rogers
I wonder what memories of yours will persist as you go on in life. My hunch is that the most important will have to do with feelings of loving and being loved - friends, family, teachers, shopkeepers - whoever's been close to you. As you continue to grow, you'll find many ways of expressing your love and you'll discover more and more ways in which others express their love for you.

Fred Rogers
It's not always easy for a father to understand the interests and ways of his son. It seems the songs of our children may be in keys we've never tried. The melody of each generation emerges from all that's gone before. Each one of us contributes in some unique way to the composition of life.

Fred Rogers
It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life.

Fred Rogers
Some days, doing "the best we can" may still fall short of what we would like to be able to do, but life isn't perfect on any front-and doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.

Fred Rogers
What matters in this life is more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others win too. Even if it means slowing down and changing our course now and then.

Fred Rogers
The purpose of life is to listen - to yourself, to your neighbor, to your world and to God and, when the time comes, to respond in as helpful a way as you can find... from within and without.

Fred Rogers
Forgiveness is a strange thing. It can sometimes be easier to forgive our enemies than our friends. It can be hardest of all to forgive people we love. Like all of life's important coping skills, the ability to forgive and the capacity to let go of resentments most likely take root very early in our lives.

Fred Rogers
Love and trust, in the space between what's said and what's heard in our life, can make all the difference in the world.

Fred Rogers
The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away.

Fred Rogers
There is no normal life that is free of pain. It's the very wrestling with our problems that can be the impetus for our growth.

Fred Rogers
I wonder if we might pledge ourselves to remember what life is really all about—not to be afraid that we're less flashy than the next, not to worry that our influence is not that of a tornado, but rather that of a grain of sand in an oyster! Do we have that kind of patience?

Fred Rogers
You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.

Fred Rogers
Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been 'You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.' Maybe I'm going on too long, but I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.

Fred Rogers
How we deal with the big disappointments in life depends a great deal on how the people who loved us helped us deal with smaller disappointments when we were little.

Fred Rogers
I believe it's a fact of life that what we have is less important than what we make out of what we have. The same holds true for families: It's not how many people there are in a family that counts, but rather the feelings among the people who are there.

Fred Rogers
Fame is a four letter word and like tape, or zoom, or face, or pain, or life, or love, what ultimately matters is what we do with it.

Fred Rogers
How many times have you noticed that it's the little quiet moments in the midst of life that seem to give the rest extra-special meaning?

Fred Rogers
As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has—or ever will have—something inside that is unique to all time. It's our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.

Fred Rogers
It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our very being is good stuff.

Fred Rogers