Hellen Keller quotes (40):

  • The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.
  • When one door of happiness closes, another opens but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
  • No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.
  • I am only one but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something I will not refuse to do something I can do.
  • Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
  • Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything good in the world.
  • The world is moved not only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
  • Security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
  • I have always thought it would be a blessing if each person could be blind and deaf for a few days during his early adult life. Darkness would make him appreciate sight silence would teach him the joys of sound.
  • The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.
  • Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the sense shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
  • Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.
  • As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.
  • Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
  • We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.
  • College isn't the place to go for ideas.
  • Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
  • 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.
  • I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
  • 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.
  • It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.
  • One's life story cannot be told with complete veracity. A true autobiography would have to be written in states of mind, emotions, heartbeats, smiles and tears not in months and years, or physical events. Life is marked off on the soul by feelings, not by dates.
  • Not the senses I have but what I do with them is my kingdom.
  • There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
  • When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.
  • Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
  • Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.
  • One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
  • Science may have found a cure for most evils but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.
  • We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.
  • Toleration is the greatest gift of mind, it requires that same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.
  • Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.
  • 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 no way of knowing how near the harbor was. 'Light Give me light' was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.
  • I thank God for my handicaps, for through them, I have found myself, my work and my God.
  • There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.
  • Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.
  • Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
  • People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
  • Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
  • The highest result of education is tolerance.