Top 100 Fred Rogers Quotes
#1. You know, you don't have to look like everybody else to be acceptable and to feel acceptable.
Fred Rogers
#2. It's really easy to fall into the trap of believing that what we do is more important than what we are. Of course, it's the opposite that's true: What we are ultimately determines what we do!
Fred Rogers
#3. To say that you are being carried is a declaration of enormous faith and hope.
Fred Rogers
#4. The gifts we treasure most over the years are often small and simple. In easy times and tough times, what seems to matter most is the way we show those nearest us that we've been listening to their needs, to their joys, and to their challenges.
Fred Rogers
#6. I recently learned that in an average lifetime a person walks about sixty-five thousand miles. That's two and a half times around the world. I wonder where your steps will take you. I wonder how you'll use the rest of the miles you're given.
Fred Rogers
#7. It is our continuing love for our children that makes us want them to become all they can be, and their continuing love for us that helps them accept healthy discipline
from us and eventually from themselves.
Fred Rogers
#8. Parents who expect change in themselves as well as in their children, who accept it and find in it the joy as well as the pains ofgrowth, are likely to be the happiest and most confident parents.
Fred Rogers
#9. Life is deep and simple, and what our society gives us is shallow and complicated.
Fred Rogers
#10. Mutual caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other's achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain.
Fred Rogers
#11. The best teacher in the world is someone who loves what he or she does, and just loves it in front of you.
Fred Rogers
#12. Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime's work, but it's worth the effort.
Fred Rogers
#13. Love is like infinity: You can't have more or less infinity, and you can't compare two things to see if they're "equally infinite." Infinity just is, and that's the way I think love is, too.
Fred Rogers
#14. We all have only one life to live on Earth, and through television we have the choice of encouraging others to demean this life or to cherish it in creative, imaginative ways.
Fred Rogers
#15. Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.
Fred Rogers
#16. It's very important, no matter what you may do professionally, to keep alive some of the healthy interests of your youth. Children's play is not just kids' stuff. Children's play is rather the stuff of most future inventions.
Fred Rogers
#17. 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
#18. It may take months or years for a wish to come true, but it's far more likely to happen when you care so much about a wish that you'll do all you can to make it happen.
Fred Rogers
#19. 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
#20. Feelings about money
saving and spending, holding back and letting go
start very early in our lives. Stingy people have often been forced to give when they were very, very young, when they weren't ready. And generous people have often been really appreciated when they were very young.
Fred Rogers
#21. I don't believe that children can develop in a healthy way unless they feel that they have value apart from anything they own or any skill that they learn. They need to feel they enhance the life of someone else, that they are needed. Who, better than parents, can let them know that?
Fred Rogers
#22. One of the universal fears of childhood is the fear of not having value in the eyes of the people whom we admire so much.
Fred Rogers
#23. Peace means far more than the opposite of war.
Fred Rogers
#24. Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning of something else.
Fred Rogers
#25. I believe it's a fact of life that what we have is less important than what we make out of what we have.
Fred Rogers
#26. The child is in me still and sometimes not so still.
Fred Rogers
#27. 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
#28. If the grain of wheat could know fear, it would be paralyzed with anxiety at the thought of being dropped in the ground, covered over, put out of sight, doomed to inactivity, yet what a glorious harvest awaits it!
Fred Rogers
#29. I don't think anyone can grow unless he's loved exactly as he is now, appreciated for what he is rather than what he will be.
Fred Rogers
#30. Imagine what our real neighborhoods would be like if each of us offered ... just one kind word to another person.
Fred Rogers
#31. If your trusted and people will allow you to share their inner gardern ... what better gift?
Fred Rogers
#32. I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers - so many caring people in this world.
Fred Rogers
#33. Jane Addams, writing about her Twenty Years at Hull House, said, People did not want to hear about simple things. They wanted to hear about great things - simply told.
Fred Rogers
#34. As different as we are from one another, as unique as each one of us is, we are much more the same than we are different. That may be the most essential message of all, as we help our children grow toward being caring, compassionate, and charitable adults.
Fred Rogers
#35. Listening is a very active awareness of the coming together of at least two lives. Listening, as far as I'm concerned, is certainly a prerequisite of love. One of the most essential ways of saying 'I love you' is being a receptive listener.
Fred Rogers
#36. Whatever we choose to imagine can be as private as we want it to be. Nobody knows what you're thinking or feeling unless you share it.
Fred Rogers
#37. Parents don't come full bloom at the birth of the first baby. In fact parenting is about growing. It's about our own growing as much as it is about our children's growing and that kind of growing happens little by little.
Fred Rogers
#38. I hope that you're learning how important you are, how important each person you see can be. Discovering each one's specialty is the most important learning.
Fred Rogers
#39. I'm fairly convinced that the Kingdom of God is for the broken-hearted. You write of 'powerlessness.' Join the club, we are not in control. God is.
Fred Rogers
#40. You can't really love someone else unless you really love yourself first.
Fred Rogers
#41. [I]f we can bring our children understanding, comfort, and hopefulness when they need this kind of support, then they are more likely to grow into adults who can find these resources within themselves later on. (from the introduction)
Fred Rogers
#42. 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
#43. One of the greatest dignities of humankind is that each successive generation is invested in the welfare of each new generation.
Fred Rogers
#44. When we treat children's play as seriously as it deserves, we are helping them feel the joy that's to be found in the creative spirit. It's the things we play with and the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives.
Fred Rogers
#45. There's a world of difference between insisting on someone's doing something and establishing an atmosphere in which that person can grow into wanting to do it.
Fred Rogers
#46. Call them rules or call them limits, good ones, I believe, have this in common: they serve reasonable purposes; they are practical and within a child's capability; they are consistent; and they are an expression of loving concern.
Fred Rogers
#47. 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
#48. Often out of periods of losing come the greatest strivings toward a new winning streak.
Fred Rogers
#49. All our lives, we rework the things from our childhood, like feeling good about ourselves, managing our angry feelings, being able to say good-bye to people we love.
Fred Rogers
#50. People have said, 'Don't cry' to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is, 'I'm too uncomfortable when you show your feelings. Don't cry.' I'd rather have them say, 'Go ahead and cry. I'm here to be with you.'
Fred Rogers
#51. Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.
Fred Rogers
#52. Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we are not perfect.
Fred Rogers
#53. Everyone longs to be loved. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving.
Fred Rogers
#54. The world is not always a kind place. That's something all children learn for themselves, whether we want them to or not, but it's something they really need our help to understand.
Fred Rogers
#55. We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It's easy to say "It's not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem." Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.
Fred Rogers
#56. Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.
Fred Rogers
#57. Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.
Fred Rogers
#58. I went into television because I hated it so, and I thought there's some way of using this fabulous instrument to nurture those who would watch and listen,
Fred Rogers
#59. In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers.
Fred Rogers
#61. How great it is when we come to know that times of disappointment can be followed by joy; that guilt over falling short of our ideals can be replaced by pride in doing all that we can; and that anger can be channeled into creative achievements ... and into dreams that we can make come true.
Fred Rogers
#62. It's the people we love the most who can make us feel the gladdest ... and the maddest! Love and anger are such a puzzle!
Fred Rogers
#64. Transitions are almost always signs of growth, but they can bring feelings of loss. To get somewhere new, we may have to leave somewhere else behind.
Fred Rogers
#65. Sometimes people are good, and they do just what they should. But the very same people who are good sometimes are the very same people who are bad sometimes. It's funny but it's true. Its the same isn't it, for me and ...
Fred Rogers
#66. Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.
Fred Rogers
#67. The connections we make in the course of a life
maybe that's what heaven is.
Fred Rogers
#68. Love isn't a perfect state of caring ...
Fred Rogers
#69. The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self.
Fred Rogers
#70. One of the most important things a person can learn to do is to make something out of whatever he or she happens to have at the moment.
Fred Rogers
#71. 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
#72. I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.
Fred Rogers
#73. What interests me so much about the characters of the Bible is that they make mistakes but God uses them anyway, in important ways. Nobody's perfect, but God can even use our imperfection.
Fred Rogers
#74. Propel, propel, propel your craft softly down liquid solution. Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, Existence is simply illusion.
Fred Rogers
#75. What really matters is not just our own winning but helping other people to win, too.
Fred Rogers
#76. Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.
Fred Rogers
#77. It's a mistake to think we have to be lovely to be loved by humans beings or by God.
Fred Rogers
#78. It's important to know when we need to stop, reflect, and receive. In our competitive world, that might be called a waste of time.
Fred Rogers
#79. Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn't have to be a lonely kind of thing.
Fred Rogers
#80. Parents find many different ways to work their way through the assertiveness of their two-year-olds, but seeing that assertiveness as positive energy being directed toward growth as a competent individual may open up some new possibilities.
Fred Rogers
#81. Feeling good about ourselves is essential in our being able to love others.
Fred Rogers
#82. Vermont is a small state which makes an enormous difference.
Fred Rogers
#83. This evening is as brief as the twinkling of an eye yet such twinklings is what eternity is made of.
Fred Rogers
#84. I have really never considered myself a TV star. I always thought I was a neighbor who just came in for a visit.
Fred Rogers
#85. Pretending doesn't require expensive toys.
Fred Rogers
#86. I hope you're proud of yourself for the times you've said "yes," when all it meant was extra work for you and was seemingly helpful only to someone else.
Fred Rogers
#87. Try your best to make goodness attractive. That's one of the toughest assignments you'll ever be given.
Fred Rogers
#88. I feel the greatest gift we can give to anybody is the gift of our honest self.
Fred Rogers
#89. I think of discipline as the continual everyday process of helping a child learn self-discipline.
Fred Rogers
#90. How sad it is that we give up on people who are just like us.
Fred Rogers
#91. Love and success, always in that order. It's that simple AND that difficult.
Fred Rogers
#92. Anyone who has ever been able to sustain good work has had at least one person
and often many
who have believed in him or her. We just don't get to be competent human beings without a lot of different investments from others.
Fred Rogers
#93. It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life.
Fred Rogers
#94. What do you think it is that drives people to want far more than they could ever use or need? I frankly think it's insecurity. How do we let the world know that the trappings of this life are not the things that are ultimately important for being accepted?
Fred Rogers
#95. Children who have learned to be comfortably dependent can become not only comfortably independent but also comfortable with having people depend on them. They can lean, stand, and be leaned upon, because they know what a good feeling it can be to feel needed.
Fred Rogers
#96. Silence is so powerful, so important. There is so much to be learned from it.
Fred Rogers
#97. My hunch is that if we allow ourselves to give who we really are to the children in our care, we will in some way inspire cartwheels in their hearts.
Fred Rogers
#98. I must be an emotional archaeologist because I keep looking for the roots of things, particularly the roots of behavior and why I feel certain ways about certain things.
Fred Rogers
#99. You can think about things and make believe. All you have to do is think and they'll grow.
Fred Rogers
#100. The thing I remember best about successful people I've met all through the years is their obvious delight in what they're doing and it seems to have very little to do with worldly success. They just love what they're doing, and they love it in front of others.
Fred Rogers
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