Helen Keller Quotes
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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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Look the world straight in the eye.
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While the right friends are near us, we feel that all is well. Our everyday life blossoms suddenly into bright possibilities.
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I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me.
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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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The idea of brotherhood re-dawns upon the world with a broader significance than the narrow association of members in a sect or creed.
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My friends have made the story of my life.
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It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.
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Is love the sweetness of flowers?
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The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.
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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.
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The best and most beautiful things in this world cannot be seen or even heard, but must be felt with the heart.
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Long before I learned to do a sum in arithmetic or describe the shape of the earth, Miss Sullivan had taught me to find beauty in the fragrant woods, in every blade of grass, and in the curves and dimples of my baby sister's hand.
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I can see in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden.
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That the sky is brighter than the earth means little unless the earth itself is appreciated and enjoyed. Its beauty loved gives the right to aspire to the radiance of the sunrise and sunset.
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It is not possible to refer a complex difficulty to a single cause.
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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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My life has been happy because I have had wonderful friends and plenty of interesting work to do.
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We cannot freely and wisely choose the right way for ourselves unless we know both good and evil.
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He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower.
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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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True teaching cannot be learned from text-books any more than a surgeon can acquire his skill by reading about surgery.
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Now I feel as if I should succeed in doing something in mathematics, although I cannot see why it is so very important. . . The knowledge doesn't make life any sweeter or happier, does it?
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I don't want to live in a hand -me -down world of others' experiences. I want to write about me, my discoveries, my fears, my feelings, about me.