Faith & Spirit Quote by Eleanor Roosevelt

There is something deliciously deadpan in Eleanor Roosevelt admitting that a family heirloom of piety doubled as a horror anthology. Gustave Dore's Bible engravings are famous for their storm-cloud drama: angels like searchlights, sinners crumpling under divine surveillance, landscapes built to intimidate. To say it "occupied many of my hours" is to describe childhood religion as both compulsory entertainment and immersive media. Then she pivots - "and I think probably" - a hedging phrase that softens the confession while making it more believable, like someone still negotiating how much authority to grant their own feelings.

The subtext is a quiet critique of how faith is often delivered to children: not as comfort, but as spectacle. Dore's images are theology with special effects; the nightmares are the psychic tax of moral instruction staged as catastrophe. Roosevelt doesn't denounce belief, she updates it: the formative power of religion isn't just doctrine, it's aesthetics. What you stare at long enough shapes you.

Context matters because Roosevelt, later, became a public moral voice without leaning on sanctimony. This line hints at the origin story: a conscience formed not by gentle reassurance but by fear, intensity, and enforced contemplation. It's also a subtle class marker - an illustrated Dore Bible was a serious, cultured object in a well-appointed home - implying that even refined households could make dread feel like a virtue. The wry understatement is her way of reclaiming agency from that early, towering imagery.