Fred McFeely Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003), better known as Mister Rogers, was an American television host, author, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001.

Fred Rogers, best known for “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” had a long career in children’s television. He started with music, then moved to TV, became a minister, and studied child development. He created programs like “The Children’s Corner” and “Misterogers” before developing the beloved “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” in 1968, which addressed kids’ emotional and physical concerns openly and honestly. After a successful career filled with awards and accolades, he passed away in 2003, but his legacy of kindness and emotional intelligence continues to resonate with viewers of all ages.

Fred Rogers Quotes

1. “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

2. “If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of. There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”
— Fred Rogers

3. “Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.”
— Fred Rogers

4. “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

5. “There are three ways to ultimate success: The first way is to be kind. The second way is to be kind. The third way is to be kind.”
— Fred Rogers

6. “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”
— Fred Rogers

7. “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It is an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly the way he or she is, right here and now.”
— Fred Rogers

8. “Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.”
— Fred Rogers

9. “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

10. “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 doing what we can with what we have is the most we should expect of ourselves or anyone else.”
— Fred Rogers

11. “A love of learning has a lot to do with learning that we are loved.”
— Fred Rogers

12. “I like you just the way you are.”
— Fred Rogers

13. “You make each day a special day. You know how by just your being you.”
— Fred Rogers

14. “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

15. “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.”
— Fred Rogers

16. “I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers – so many caring people in this world.”
— Fred Rogers

17. “I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.”
— Fred Rogers

18. “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

19. “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

20. “Solitude is different from loneliness, and it doesn’t have to be a lonely kind of thing.”
— Fred Rogers

21. “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

22. “The greatest gift you ever give is your honest self.”
— Fred Rogers

23. “Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me.”
— Fred Rogers

24. “The connections we make in the course of a life – maybe that’s what heaven is.”
— Fred Rogers

25. “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

26. “I believe that appreciation is a holy thing – that when we look for what’s best in a person we happen to be with at the moment, we’re doing what God does all the time. So in loving and appreciating our neighbor, we’re participating in something sacred.”
— Fred Rogers

27. “Honesty is often very hard. The truth is often painful. But the freedom it can bring is worth the trying.”
— Fred Rogers

28. “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

29. “Real strength has to do with helping others.”
— Fred Rogers

30. “Attitudes are caught, not taught.”
— Fred Rogers

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “I think everybody longs to be loved and longs to know that he or she is lovable and, consequently, the greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they are loved and capable of loving.”
— Fred Rogers

35. “Love begins with listening.”
— Fred Rogers

36. “Life is for service.”
— Fred Rogers

37. “Listening is where love begins: listening to ourselves and then to our neighbors.”
— Fred Rogers

38. “Anything mentionable is manageable.”
— Fred Rogers

39. “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

40. “Play is really the work of childhood.”
— Fred Rogers

41. “We Don’t always succeed in what we try, certainly not by the world’s standards, but I think you’ll find it’s the willingness to keep trying that matters most.”
— Fred Rogers

42. “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

43. “The only thing evil can’t stand is forgiveness.”
— Fred Rogers

44. “Feeling good about ourselves is essential in our being able to love others.”
— Fred Rogers

45. “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine; could you be mine?”
— Fred Rogers

46. “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

47. “The greatest gift that you can give another person is to gracefully receive whatever it is that they want to give us.”
— Fred Rogers

48. “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

49. “Life is deep and simple, and what our society gives us is shallow and complicated.”
— Fred Rogers

50. “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being.”
— Fred Rogers

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

52. “Knowing that we can be loved exactly as we are gives us all the best opportunity for growing into the healthiest of people.”
— Fred Rogers

53. “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

54. “All I know to do is to light the candle that has been given to me.”
— Fred Rogers

55. “The child is in me still and sometimes not so still.”
— Fred Rogers

56. “The world needs a sense of worth, and it will achieve it only by its people feeling that they are worthwhile.”
— Fred Rogers

57. “We speak with more than our mouths. We listen with more than our ears.”
— Fred Rogers

58. “You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are.”
— Fred Rogers

59. “There is something of yourself that you leave at every meeting with another person.”
— Fred Rogers

60. “Discovering the truth about ourselves is a lifetime’s work, but it’s worth the effort.”
— Fred Rogers

61. “It’s a mistake to think that we have to be lovely to be loved by human beings or by God.”
— Fred Rogers

62. “I’m proud of you for the times you came in second, or third, or fourth, but what you did was the best you have ever done.”
— Fred Rogers

63. “We all have different gifts, so we all have different ways of saying to the world who we are.”
— Fred Rogers

64. “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

65. “We want to raise our children so that they can take a sense of pleasure in both their own heritage and the diversity of others.”
— Fred Rogers

66. “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

67. “You know, you don’t have to look like everybody else to be acceptable and to feel acceptable.”
— Fred Rogers

68. “Silence is so powerful, so important. There is so much to be learned from it.”
— Fred Rogers

69. “How sad it is that we give up on people who are just like us.”
— Fred Rogers

70. “Hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”
— Fred Rogers

71. “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

72. “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

73. “When I was a boy I used to think that STRONG meant having big muscles, and great physical power; but the longer I live, the more I realize that real strength has much more to do with what is NOT seen. Real strength has to do with helping others.”
— Fred Rogers

74. “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

75. “It’s not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It’s 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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “The kingdom of God is for the brokenhearted.”
— Fred Rogers

79. “Love isn’t a perfect state of caring.”
— Fred Rogers

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

81. “When our children see us expressing our emotions, they can learn that their own feelings are natural and permissible, can be expressed, and can be talked about. That’s an important thing for our children to learn.”
— Fred Rogers

82. “We need to help people to discover the true meaning of love. Love is generally confused with dependence. Those of us who have grown in true love know that we can love only in proportion to our capacity for independence.”
— Fred Rogers

83. “Try your best to make goodness attractive. That’s one of the toughest assignments you’ll ever be given.”
— Fred Rogers

84. “Whether we’re a preschooler or a young teen, a graduating college senior or a retired person, we human beings all want to know that we’re acceptable, that our being alive somehow makes a difference in the lives of others.”
— Fred Rogers

85. “Who we are in the present includes who we were in the past.”
— Fred Rogers

86. “The most important learning is the ability to accept and expect mistakes, and deal with the disappointments that they bring.”
— Fred Rogers

87. “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

88. “The older I get, the more convinced I am that the space between people who are trying their best to understand each other is hallowed ground.”
— Fred Rogers

89. “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

90. “Often out of periods of losing come the greatest strivings toward a new winning streak.”
— Fred Rogers

91. “I don’t want to eat anything that has a mother.”
— Fred Rogers

92. “Love isn’t a state of perfect caring, it is an active noun like struggle.”
— Fred Rogers

93. “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

94. “We’re all on a journey – each one of us. And if we can be sensitive to the person who happens to be our neighbor, that, to me, is the greatest challenge as well as the greatest pleasure.”
— Fred Rogers

95. “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

96. “It would have been sad for me to spend my life just trying to superimpose stuff on people rather than trying to encourage them to look within themselves for what’s of value.”
— Fred Rogers

97. “When we’re able to resign ourselves to the wishes that will never come true, there can be enormous energies available within us for whatever we CAN do.”
— Fred Rogers

98. “Taking care is one way to show your love. Another way is letting people take good care of you when you need it.”
— Fred Rogers

99. “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

100. “I think that those who would try to make you feel less than who you are, I think that’s the greatest evil.”
— Fred Rogers