Helen Keller Quotes
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Not the senses I have but what I do with them is my kingdom.
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Look the world straight in the eye.
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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.
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I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.
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If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life. If, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.
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I will not just live my life. I will not just spend my life. I will invest my life.
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The only real blind person at Christmas time is he who has not Christmas in his heart.
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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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The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.
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Smells are the fallen angels of the senses.
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Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.
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I don't give a damn about semi-radicals!
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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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Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was.
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The simplest way to be happy is to do good.
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Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.
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I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think. Whereas, if the child is left to himself, he will think more and better, if less showily.
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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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Education should train the child to use his brains, to make for himself a place in the world and maintain his rights even when it seems that society would shove him into the scrap-heap.
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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? Until the spirit of love for our fellow people, regardless of race, color, or creed, shall fill the world, making real in our lives and our deeds the actuality of human brother- and sisterhood, until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare, social justice can never be attained.
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My life has been happy because I have had wonderful friends and plenty of interesting work to do.
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Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.
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The continued lynchings and other crimes against negroes, whether in New England or the South, and unspeakable political exponents of white supremacy, according to all recorded history, augur ill for America's future.
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When all you can feel are the shadows, turn your face towards the sun. There is always a bright side - even if only that it is not worse...and it can always be worse