Capitalizing quotations with initial omission?

Solution 1:

In its section on "Quotations and Dialogue: Permissible changes to punctuation, capitalization, and spelling" [Section 13.7, if you have a subscription] the Chicago Manual of Style says:

The initial letter may be changed to a capital or a lowercase letter.

It expands further:

To suit this requirement, the first word in a quoted passage must often be adjusted to conform to the surrounding text. In most types of works, this adjustment may be done silently... In some types of works, however, it may be obligatory to indicate the change by bracketing the initial quoted letter; for examples of this practice, appropriate to legal writing and some types of textual commentary, see 13.16.

So:

"We learn who we really are and then live with that decision." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

—or—

"[W]e learn who we really are and then live with that decision." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

The latter would be used in a work where more rigor was required.

Addendum: The Chicago Manual raises a valid point that others responding to this question have echoed:

Authors drawing on the work of others to illustrate their arguments should first decide whether direct quotation or paraphrase will be more effective.

Solution 2:

I don't take my wisdom about proper usage from law book sites. When I do any incomplete quoting, I use ellipses, no matter which part of the quote I snipped. In your example, I would do this: "...we learn who we really are and then live with that decision."

Or, a more modern approach: "[snip]we learn who we really are and then live with that decision." ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Absolutely no initial capitalization if you removed the original first word from the sentence(s).

Blessings!