Helen Keller Quotes:

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

Topics: Inspirational, Women, Sight, Blinded, Famous Motivational

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

source: - "Optimism". Essay by Helen Keller, 1903.

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Positive, Improve Self Esteem, Inspirational Achievement

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.

source: - Helen Keller (1957). “The Open Door”, Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Strength, Good Character, Soul Force

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.

Topics: Brother, Real, Responsibility, Social Welfare, Sense Of Responsibility

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.

Topics: Spiritual, Doe, Superstitions, Experiencing Things, Either Or

Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Motivational, Indian Happy New Year, Joy And Sadness

Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.

Topics: Softball, Faith, Inspiration, Inspirational Strength, Strength And Faith

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.

source: - "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Love, Inspirational, Funny, Physical Beauty, Long Relationship

Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Success, Live Life To Its Fullest, Life Philosophy

Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.

Topics: Inspirational, Graduation, Confidence, Inspirational Addiction Recovery, Inspirational Confidence

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

source: - "Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy". Book by Joseph P. Lash, 1980.

Topics: Inspirational, Leadership, Loyalty, Joint Efforts, Inspirational Team

I can not do everything, but I can do something. I must not fail to do the something that I can do.

Topics: Success, Failing, Can Not, Professional Career, Motivational Career

All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Courage, Soul Healing, Godlike

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

source: - James W. Loewen (2013). “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong”, p.44, The New Press

Topics: Sad, Stars, Thinking

Our beloved ones have not 'gone to a far country.' It is only the veil of sense that separates them from us, and even that veil grows thin when our thoughts reach out to them.

Topics: Country, Gone, Veils

Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.

Topics: Friendship, Loneliness, Real Friends, Making Friends, Bff

What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.

Topics: Love, Death, Grief, Endless Love, Everlasting Love

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

Topics: Life, Women, Grieving, Self Awareness, Developmental

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

Topics: Inspirational, Wisdom, Patience, Joy To The World, Resiliency

Be of good cheer. Do not think of today's failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.

source: - Helen Keller (2009). “The Story of My Life: With Her Letters and a Supplementary Account of Her Education”, p.544, The Floating Press

Topics: Life, Motivational, Success, Something Beautiful, Difficult Tasks

Often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.

source: - Helen Keller (2000). “To Love this Life: Quotations”, p.25, American Foundation for the Blind

Topics: Doors, Long, Looks, Daily Work, Always Happy

Security is mostly a superstition. It 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 outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Strength, Journey Inspirational, I Am Strong

We the living, should not think of the dead as lonely because if they could speak to us, they would say: "Do not weep for me, earth was not my true country, I was an alien there: I am at Home where everyone comes."

Topics: Country, Lonely, Loneliness

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.

Topics: Philosophy, Sisterhood, Thoughtful, Parallelogram

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.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Motivational, Just Be Happy, Secret To Happiness

Look the world straight in the eye.

Topics: Motivational, Eye, Looks

Doubts and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.

Topics: Heart, Imagination, Mind, Steadfast

The highest result of education is tolerance.

Topics: Forgiveness, Education, Appreciation, Great Teacher, Patience And Tolerance

As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.

Topics: Joy, Mind, Vision, Joy Of Living, Joy To The World

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.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Success, Accomplishing Great Things, Achieve Greatness

Worse than being blind would be to be able to see but not have any vision.

Topics: Vision, Would Be, Able

I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the colour and fragrance of a flower - the Light in my darkness, the Voice in my silence.

Topics: God, Spiritual, Believe

Oh, you think the darkness is your ally, but you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it. Molded by it.

Topics: Dark, Thinking, Allies, Bane

A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn.

Topics: Inspirational, Moving On, Encouraging, Inspirational Adversity, Bends In The Road

I, for one, love strength, daring, fortitude. I do not want people to kill the fight in them; I want them to fight for right things.

Topics: Fighting, People, Want, Love Strength

Death is no more than passing from one room into another.

Topics: Death, Rooms, Passing, Inspirational Death, Death And Dying

This world is so full of care and sorrow that it is a gracious debt we owe to one another to discover the bright crystals of delight hidden in somber circumstances and irksome tasks.

Topics: Gratitude, Sorrow, Tasks, Somber

Life is an adventure or nothing

Topics: Adventure, Life Is, Life Is An Adventure

We need limitations and temptations to open our inner selves, dispel our ignorance, tear off disguises, throw down old idols, and destroy false standards. Only by such rude awakenings can we be led to dwell in a place where we are less cramped, less hindered by the ever-insistent External. Only then do we discover a new capacity and appreciation of goodness and beauty and truth.

Topics: Appreciation, Ignorance, Self

Things must be felt with the heart.

Topics: Heart, Great Feelings, Physical Beauty, Say I Love You, Long Relationship

Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents of life, its outer trappings. The great, enduring realities are love of service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulty.

Topics: Happiness, Lying, Reality, Joy Of Life

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

Topics: Mean, Men, Criticism, Thorough Knowledge

Certainly it is one of our sweetest experiences that when we are touched by some noble affection or pure joy, we remember the dead most tenderly, and feel more powerfully drawn to them.

Topics: Joy, Noble, Remember, Pure Joy

Happiness does not come from without, it comes from within

Topics: Happiness, Positivity, Doe

The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.

Topics: Teacher, Cheer, Teaching, Happier Life, Unselfish

Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.

Topics: Inspirational, Gymnastics, Acceptance, Inspirational Addiction Recovery, Deficiency

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!

Topics: Peace, War, Battle, Against War, Third World War

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.

Topics: Running, Struggle, Fall

So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.

Topics: Pain, Long, Life Is, Suffering And Pain, Suffering Pain

Masculine exhalations are, as a rule, stronger, more vivid,more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness.

Topics: Beautiful, Strong, Men, Buoyancy

It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference.

Topics: Inspirational, Mistake, Ignorance

To keep our faces toward chance and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

Topics: Inspirational, Fate, Free Spirit, Fate And Destiny, Life Adventure

What is worse than having no sight is being able to see but having no vision.

Topics: Graduation, Sight, Vision

If we do not like our work, and do not try to get happiness out of it, we are a menace to our profession as well as to ourselves.

Topics: Work, Trying, Menace

Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.

Topics: Positive, Encouragement, Hopeful, Nothing Is Impossible, Impossible Dream

My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges.

Topics: Friendship, Beautiful, Privilege, Scrapbooking, Story Of My Life

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Topics: Freedom, Real, Mean, Libertarianism

Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.

Topics: Happiness, Thinking, Firsts, Others Happiness, Happiness Within

A person who is severely impaired never knows his hidden sources of strength until he is treated like a normal human being and encouraged to shape his own life.

Topics: Shapes, Normal, Source, Source Of Strength

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.

Topics: Real, Blow, Men, Real Happiness

Happiness calls out responsive gladness in others. There is enough sadness in the world without yours ... never doubt the excellence and permanence of what is yet to be. Join the great company of those who make the barren places of life fruitful with kindness.

Topics: Happiness, Kindness, Sadness, Gladness, Sadness And Sorrow

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away.

Topics: Summer, Sweet, Memories, Ripening, Transport

The world is sown with good; but unless I turn my glad thoughts into practical living and till my own field. I cannot reap a kernel of the good.

Topics: Fields, World, Earth, Kernel

Relationships are like Rome -- difficult to start out, incredible during the prosperity of the 'golden age', and unbearable during the fall. Then, a new kingdom will come along and the whole process will repeat itself until you come across a kingdom like Egypt... that thrives, and continues to flourish. This kingdom will become your best friend, your soul mate, and your love.

Topics: Relationship, Soulmate, Fall, Golden Age, Soul Mate

Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.

Topics: Beautiful, Women, Effort

If I, deaf, blind, find life rich and interesting, how much more can you gain by the use of your five senses!

Topics: Interesting, Five Senses, Use

The only real blind person at Christmas time is he who has not Christmas in his heart.

Topics: Christmas, Real, Heart, Christmas Time, Opening Our Hearts

Literature is my Utopia

Topics: Book, Reading, Literature

While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.

Topics: Happiness, Determination, Bad Ass

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Motivational, Life Is An Adventure, Adventurer

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Moving On, Inspirational Self Esteem, Self Pity

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.

Topics: Death, Wisdom, Peace, Achieving Peace, Funerals And Death

The power of effecting changes for the better is within ourselves, not in the favorableness of circumstances.

Topics: Change For The Better, Circumstances

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Effort, Biking, Peace And Tolerance

Every one of us is blind and deaf until our eyes are opened to our fellowmen, until our ears hear the voice of humanity.

Topics: Eye, Voice, Humanity

The attempt to suppress an idea has always and everywhere proved a failure.

Topics: Ideas

When you lose your vision, you lose contact with things. When you lose your hearing, you lose contact with people.

Topics: People, Vision, Hearing

Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.

Topics: Love, Beauty, Beautiful, May Flowers, Inspirational Flower

When indeed shall we learn that we are all related one to the other, that we are all members of one body?

Topics: Body, Members

The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Peace, Spiritual Vision, Leadership And Vision

Once I knew only darkness and stillness... my life was without past or future... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

Topics: Love, Life, Future

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.

Topics: Women, Responsibility, Justice

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Vision, Great Vision

It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

Topics: Women, Sky, Mountain

So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

Topics: Friendship, Inspiring, Good Life, My Life Is Good, Beloved Friends

THE most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me

Topics: Teacher, Important, Remember, Three Months, Important Days

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Topics: Inspirational, Wisdom, Patience, Spiritual Darkness, Darkness To Light

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.

Topics: Relationship, Self Esteem, Science, Indifference And Apathy, Two Evils

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Topics: Happy, God, Dark

Knowledge is love and light and vision.

Topics: Christian, Education, Knowledge, Light And Knowledge, Pursuit Of Knowledge

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Leadership, Appease, Story Of My Life

For three things I thank God every day of my life: thanks that he has vouchsafed me knowledge of his works; deep thanks that he has set in my darkness the lamp of faith; deep, deepest thanks that I have another life to look forward to--a life joyous with light and flowers and heavenly song.

Topics: Thanksgiving, Song, Flower

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.

Topics: Years, Smell, Wizards

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.

Topics: Sad, Flower, Ex Boyfriend, Vagueness, Sad Life

Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.

Topics: Eye, Sight, Literature

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

Topics: Women, Memorable, Democracy, Denominations

There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

Topics: Life, Kings, Diversity, Genealogy, Family History

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.

Topics: Hard Work, Heart, Doors, Easy Tasks, Great Work Ethic

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.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Happiness, Marvelous, Traverse

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

Topics: Friendship, Sweet, Book, Socially Awkward, Disenfranchised

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.

Topics: Respect, Appreciation, Struggle

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

Topics: Motivational, People, Immature

Once I knew the depth where no hope was and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free. Once I fretted and beat myself against the wall that shut me in. My life was without a past or future, and death a consummation devoutly to be wished. But a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hands that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped up with the rapture of living. I do not know the meaning of the darkness, but I have learned the overcoming of it.

Topics: Love, Wall, Heart

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

Topics: Graduation, Witty, Educational, Going To College, College Days

My share of the work may be limited, but the fact that it is work makes it precious.

Topics: Inspirational, Work, Literature

We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Motivational, Inspirational Perseverance, Perseverance Motivational

What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.

Topics: Teacher, Retirement, Self, Blind People, Blind Person

Unless we form the habit of going to the Bible in bright moments as well as in trouble, we cannot fully respond to its consolations because we lack equilibrium between light and darkness.

Topics: Light, Darkness, Moments, Light And Darkness

No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.

Topics: Happiness, Happy, Wise, What Is Happiness

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.

Topics: Running, Courage, Long

Certainly I believe that God gave us life for happiness, not misery. Humanity, I am sure, will never be made lazy or indifferent by an excess of happiness. 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. Happiness should be a means of accomplishment, like health, not an end in itself.

Topics: Believe, Mean, Self, Wrong Ideas, Self Gratification

Life is short and unpredictable. Eat the dessert first!

Topics: Inspirational Life, Life Is Short, Firsts, Dessert First

Museums and art stores are also sources of pleasure and inspiration. Doubtless it will seem strange to many that the hand unaided by sight can feel action, sentiment, beauty in the cold marble; and yet it is true that I derive genuine pleasure from touching great works of art. As my finger tips trace line and curve, they discover the thought and emotion which the artist has portrayed.

Topics: Beauty, Art, Inspiration, Thoughts And Emotions

The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction.

Topics: Knowledge, World, Construction

Once I knew the depth where no hope was and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free.

Topics: Bad Ass, Soul, Darkness

Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow.

Topics: Morning, Fire, Joy

The human being is born with an incurable capacity for making the best of things.

Topics: Born, Capacity, Humans

The heart of a friend gives out sufficient light for us in the dark to rise by.

Topics: Heart, Dark, Light

He who is content with what has been done is an obstacle in the path of progress.

Topics: Progress, Done, Complacency

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!

Topics: Roots, Long, Miracle, Priestesses

Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!

Topics: War, Hero, Army, Obedient

The simplest way to be happy is to do good.

Topics: You Make Me Happy, Way, Make Me Happy

It gives me a deep comforting sense that Things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal.

Topics: Giving, Comforting, Unseen, Seen And Unseen, Unseen Things

You will succeed if you persevere; and you will find joy in overcoming obstacles.

Topics: Inspirational, Joy, Overcoming

Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.

Topics: Acceptance, Thinking, Men

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought! Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder! Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings! Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!

Topics: War, Hero, Mean

Your success and happiness lie within you. External conditions are the accidents of life, its outer trappings.

Topics: Success, Lying, Accidents

If we make up our minds that this is a drab and purposeless universe, it will be that, and nothing else. On the other hand, if we believe that the earth is ours, and that the sun and moon hang in the sky for our delight, there will be joy upon the hills and gladness in the fields because the Artist in our souls glorifies creation. Surely, it gives dignity to life to believe that we are born into this world for noble ends, and that we have a higher destiny than can be accomplished within the narrow limits of this physical life.

Topics: Believe, Artist, Moon

The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

Topics: Fear, Caught, Fearful, Kickass Women, Strong Women And Love

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.

Topics: Optimism, Evil, Effort

The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, - the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience.

Topics: Acceptance, Men, Rights

The greatest tragedy to befall a person is to have sight but lack vision.

Topics: Sight, Vision, Tragedy

It need not discourage us if we are full of doubts. Healthy questions keep faith dynamic. In fact, unless we start with doubts we cannot have a deep-rooted faith. One who believes lightly and unthinkingly has not much of a belief. One who has a faith which is not to be shaken has won it through blood and tears-has worked his or her way from doubt to truth as one who reaches a clearing through a thicket of brambles and thorns.

Topics: Believe, Blood, Healthy, Thickets

The inferiority of women is man-made.

Topics: Men, Inferiority, Made

It is curious to observe what different ideals of happiness people cherish, and in what singular places they look for this well-spring of their life. Many look for it in the hoarding of riches, some in the pride of power, and others in the achievements of art and literature; a few seek it in the exploration of their own minds, or in search for knowledge.

Topics: Art, Spring, Pride, Search For Knowledge

Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.

Topics: Ideas, Defeat, Tyranny, Power Of Ideas

I do not like the world as it is; so I am trying to make it a little more as I want it.

Topics: Trying, World, Want

We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means we choose between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. We elect expensive masters to do our work for us, and then blame them because they work for themselves and for their class.

Topics: Mean, Class, Names

Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge - broad, deep knowledge - is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.

Topics: Deep Life, Ends, Lows

I will not just live my life. I will not just spend my life. I will invest my life.

Topics: Living My Life, Just Live

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.

Topics: Fate, Order, Optimism

We are never really happy until we try to brighten the lives of others.

source: - Helen Keller (2000). “To Love this Life: Quotations”, p.26, American Foundation for the Blind

Topics: Trying, Lives Of Others, Really Happy

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.

Topics: Children, Rights, Brain

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.

Topics: Race, People, Balance, World Population, Population Control

What do I consider a teacher should be? One who breathes life into knowledge so that it takes new form in progress and civilization.

Topics: Teacher, Civilization, Progress

I cannot but say a word and look my disapproval when I hear that my country is spending millions for war and war engines-more, I have heard, than twice as much as the entire public school system costs the nation.

Topics: Country, War, School

I believe humility is a virtue, but I prefer not to use it unless it is absolutely necessary.

Topics: Believe, Humility, Use

What a strange life I lead- a kind of Cinderella-life-half glitter in crystal shoes, half mice and cinders! But it is a wonderful life all the same.

Topics: Shoes, Crystals, Half, Wonderful Life

The true test of a character is to face hard conditions with the determination to make them better.

Topics: Determination, Character, Tests

The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old.

Topics: Teacher, Years, Two

What really counts in life is the quiet meeting of every difficulty with the determination to get out of it all the good there is.

Topics: Determination, Quiet, Life Is

Only in quietness do we possess our own minds and discover the resources of the Inner Life.

Topics: Mind, Resources, Quietness, Inner Life

The chief handicap of the blind is not blindness, but the attitude of seeing people towards them.

Topics: Attitude, People, Blind

Life is a daring adventure, or nothing.

Topics: Travel, Adventure, Life Is

If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.

Topics: Inspirational, Happiness, Encouragement, Optimistic Life, People With Disabilities

The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel.

Topics: Vision, Receiving, Wonder, Keenness

There is beauty in everything, even in silence and darkness.

Topics: Silence, Darkness

Four things to learn in life: To think clearly without hurry or confusion; To love everybody sincerely; To act in everything with the highest motives; To trust God unhesitatingly.

source: - Helen Keller, Annie Sullivan (1921). “The Story of My Life: with her letters (1887--1901) and a supplementary account of her education, including passages from the reports and letters of her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan”, Doubleday, Page & Company

Topics: Life, Learning, Thinking

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.

Topics: Country, Mean, Men, Speculators, Ownership And Control

Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.

Topics: Pain, Believe, Emotional, Suffering And Pain, Suffering Pain

The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed.

Topics: Education, Educated, Humans

We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world--the company of those who have known suffering.

Topics: Grief, Loss, Grieving

I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!

Topics: Lying, Heaven, Soul

The most beautiful world is always entered through imagination.

Topics: Motivational, Beautiful, Imagination, Beautiful World, Creative Imagination

Your success and happiness lie in you.

Topics: Inspirational, Success, Lying

It is so pleasant to learn about new things. Every day I find how little I know, but I do not feel discouraged since God has given me an eternity in which to learn more.

Topics: Littles, Eternity, Discouraged

Do not think of todays failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow.

Topics: Giving Up, Failure, Thinking

Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.

Topics: Writing, Space, Work Out

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.

Topics: Children, Heart, Sunshine, Handshake, Shaking Hands

No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars.

Topics: Nature, Stars, Secret, Optimism And Pessimism, Questioning Beliefs

When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

source: - Helen Keller (1957). “The Open Door”, Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Perseverance, Empowering Women, Miracle Of Life

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.

Topics: Skills, Arrows, Eagles

Defeat is simply a signal to press onward.

Topics: Bad Day, Defeat, Signals, Perseverence

The mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'W-A-T-E-R' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free.

Topics: Light, Hands, Water

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Positive

The welfare of each is bound up in the welfare of all.

Topics: Teamwork, Welfare, Interconnection

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.

Topics: Interest

It is not possible for civilization to flow backwards while there is youth in the world. Youth may be headstrong, but it will advance it allotted length.

Topics: Civilization, Flow, Literature, Headstrong

I wonder what becomes of lost opportunities? Perhaps our guardian angel gathers them up as we drop them, and will give them back to us in the beautiful sometime when we have grown wiser, and learned how to use them rightly.

Topics: Beautiful, Angel, Opportunity, Lost Opportunity

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Positive, Joy And Sadness, Inspirational Cancer

I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.

source: - "The Book of Good Cheer : A Little Bundle of Cheery Thoughts‎" by Edwin Osgood Grover, (p. 28), 1909.

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Single, Making A Difference In The World, Inspirational Student

It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.

Topics: Happiness, Time, Women

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.

Topics: Life, Women, Generosity

A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.

Topics: Inspirational, Happiness, Encouragement, Life And Passion, How To Be Happy

I am not a perfect being. . . . I have more faults than I know what to do with. I have a naughty temper. I am stubborn, impatient of hindrances and of stupidity. I have not in the truest sense a Christian spirit. I am naturally a fighter. I am lazy. I put off till tomorrow what I might better do today. I do not feel that I have been compensated for the two senses I lack. I have worked hard for all the senses I have got, and always I beg for more.

Topics: Christian, Naughty, Two

More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.

Topics: Book, Fall, Hands

I am only one but still i am one

Topics: Stills

There is no better way to thank God for your sight than by giving a helping hand to someone in the dark.

Topics: Eye, Dark, Helping Others, Helping Hand

So much has been given to me I have not time to ponder over that which has been denied.

Topics: Gratitude, Famous Inspirational, Given

Each day comes to me with both hands full of possibilities.

Topics: Hands, Each Day, Possibility

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.

Topics: Heart, Needs, Great Poetry

Blindness separates us from things but deafness separates us from people.

Topics: Loss, People, Deafness, Hearing Loss

I thank God for my handicaps. For through them, I have found myself, my work and my God.

Topics: Gratitude, Adversity, Knowing Who You Are

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.

Topics: Twilight, Struggle, Moving, Standstill

A simple, childlike faith in a Divine Friend solves all the problems that come to us by land or sea

Topics: Children, Simple, Sea, Childlike Faith, Childlike

Sick or well, blind or seeing, bond or free, we are here for a purpose and however we are situated, we please God better with useful deeds than with many prayers or pious resignation. The temple or church is empty unless the good of life fills it . . . holy if only . . . we offer the only sacrifices ever commanded-the love that is stronger than hate and the faith that overcometh doubt.

Topics: Life, Prayer, Hate

No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.

Topics: Happiness, Generosity, Philanthropy

I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings.

Topics: Death, Believe, Soul, Immortal Soul

To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.

Topics: Nature, Garden, Luxury, Inspirational Gardening, Inspiring Nature

In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities.

Topics: Sweet, Book, Literature, Awkwardness