Helen Keller Quotes
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For years to come the debris of a convulsed world will beset our steps. It will require a purpose stronger than any man and worthy of all men to calm and inspirit us. A sane society whose riches are happy children, men and women, beautiful with peace and creative activity, is not going to be ordained for us. We must make it ourselves.
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With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution to my being of happiness, strength and understanding remains to sustain me in an altered world.
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Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
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Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.
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Smell is a fallen angel.
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Commercial concerns have expanded from family business to corporate wealth which is self-perpetuating and which enlightened statesmen and economists now dread as the most potent oligarchy yet produced.
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During the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out. If we have once seen, "the day is ours, and what the day has shown."
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Not the senses I have but what I do with them is my kingdom.
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I have never believed that my limitations were in any sense punishments or accidents. If I had held such a view, I could never have expected the strength to overcome them.
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Be happy, talk happiness. Happiness calls out responsive gladness in others. There is enough sadness in the world without yours.
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My darkness has been filled with the light of intelligence, and behold, the outer day-lit world was stumbling and groping in social blindness.
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I trust, and I recognize the beneficence of the power which we all worship as supreme- Order, Fate, the Great Spirit, Nature, God. I recognize this power in the sun that makes all things grow and keeps life afoot. I make a friend of this indefinable force…this is my religion of optimism.
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Personally I do not believe in a national agency devoted only to the negro blind because in spirit and principle I am against all segregation, and the blind already have difficulties enough without being cramped and harassed by social barriers.
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Faith is a mockery if it does not teach us that we can build a more complete and beautiful world.
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The true test of a character is to face hard conditions with the determination to make them better.
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The highest thinkers of the ages, the seers of the tribes and the nations, have been optimists.
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Blindness separates us from things but deafness separates us from people.
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I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
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Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.
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It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me...if much has been denied me, much, very much, has been given me.
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What can rulers, nobility and all the lords of the earth say to justify the horrible killing and maiming of twenty or thirty million valuable men who a short while ago ploughed, dug, wove, built, guided the traffic of the world, took their pleasure, loved their fellows, cherished their families, and feared naught?
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Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.
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Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail.
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The power of effecting changes for the better is within ourselves, not in the favorableness of circumstances.