Helen Keller Quotes
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The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.
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The breakage and agony rending us today will be our salvation if they drive us by new routes to meet it. No one can proxy for us a masterpiece of loving or experience for us the rapture of art or launch for us book ships freighted with sweet bread to strengthen man. As of old we must be our own seers, musicians and explorers, and to an extent vaster than ever before.
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I can not do everything, but I can do something. I must not fail to do the something that I can do.
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The tragic side of many architectural enterprises is that they destroy natural beauties which are a priceless possession and cannot be replaced.
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People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
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More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.
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We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.
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I know no study that will take you nearer the way to happiness than the study of nature - and I include in the study of nature not only things and their forces, but also mankind and their ways, and the moulding of the affections and the will into an earnest desire not only to be happy, but to create happiness.
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Smell is a fallen angel.
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Joy is a spiritual element that gives vicissitudes unity and significance.
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We have prayed, we have coaxed, we have begged, for the vote, with the hope that men, out of chivalry, would bestow equal rights upon women and take them into partnership in the affairs of the state. We hoped that their common sense would triumph over prejudices and stupidity. We thought their boasted sense of justice would overcome the errors that so often fetter the human spirit; but we have always gone away empty handed. We shall beg no more.
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It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.
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I have often been asked, Do not people bore you? I do not understand quite what that means. I suppose the calls of the stupid and curious, especially of newspaper reporters, are always inopportune. I also dislike people who try to talk down to my understanding. They are like people who when walking with you try to shorten their steps to suit yours; the hypocrisy in both cases is equally exasperating.
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It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal.
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A simple, childlike faith in a Divine Friend solves all the problems that come to us by land or sea
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The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy, that when I clasped their frosty finger-tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart. It may be only the clinging touch of a child's hand; but there is as much potential sunshine in it for me as there is in a loving glance for others. A hearty handshake or a friendly letter gives me genuine pleasure.
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Defeat is simply a signal to press onward.
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One should never count the years -- one should instead count one's interests. I have kept young trying never to lose my childhood sense of wonderment. I'm glad I still have a vivid curiosity about the world I live in.
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So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,' and a 'modern miracle.' But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics-that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world-that is a different matter!
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The chief handicap of the blind is not blindness, but the attitude of seeing people towards them.
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When indeed shall we learn that we are all related one to the other, that we are all members of one body?
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When one comes to think of it, there are no such things as divine, immutable, or inalienable rights. Rights are things we get when we are strong enough to make good our claim on them.
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Reality even when it is sad is better than illusions. Illusions are at the mercy of any winds that blow. Real happiness must come from within, from a fixed purpose and faith in one's fellow men.
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Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world.