Helen Keller quotes
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“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”
-- Helen KellerSource : "Optimism". Essay by Helen Keller, 1903.
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“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.”
-- Helen KellerSource : Helen Keller (1957). “The Open Door”, Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday
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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.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.”
-- Helen Keller -
“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.”
-- Helen KellerSource : "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.
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“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”
-- Helen KellerSource : "Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy". Book by Joseph P. Lash, 1980.
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“I can not do everything, but I can do something. I must not fail to do the something that I can do.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.”
-- Helen Keller -
“People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.”
-- Helen KellerSource : James W. Loewen (2013). “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong”, p.44, The New Press
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“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”
-- Helen Keller -
“What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.”
-- Helen Keller -
“We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen KellerSource : Helen Keller (2009). “The Story of My Life: With Her Letters and a Supplementary Account of Her Education”, p.544, The Floating Press
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“Often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one that has been opened for us.”
-- Helen KellerSource : Helen Keller (2000). “To Love this Life: Quotations”, p.25, American Foundation for the Blind
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“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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."”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Doubts and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.”
-- Helen Keller -
“The highest result of education is tolerance.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Worse than being blind would be to be able to see but not have any vision.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“Oh, you think the darkness is your ally, but you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it. Molded by it.”
-- Helen Keller -
“A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Death is no more than passing from one room into another.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Happiness does not come from without, it comes from within”
-- Helen Keller -
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“The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“To keep our faces toward chance and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“What is worse than having no sight is being able to see but having no vision.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.”
-- Helen Keller -
“My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.”
-- Helen Keller -
“If I, deaf, blind, find life rich and interesting, how much more can you gain by the use of your five senses!”
-- Helen Keller -
“The only real blind person at Christmas time is he who has not Christmas in his heart.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Life is either a great adventure or nothing.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.”
-- Helen Keller -
“I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“The power of effecting changes for the better is within ourselves, not in the favorableness of circumstances.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Every one of us is blind and deaf until our eyes are opened to our fellowmen, until our ears hear the voice of humanity.”
-- Helen Keller -
“The attempt to suppress an idea has always and everywhere proved a failure.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“When you lose your vision, you lose contact with things. When you lose your hearing, you lose contact with people.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.”
-- Helen Keller -
“When indeed shall we learn that we are all related one to the other, that we are all members of one body?”
-- Helen Keller -
“The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.”
-- Helen Keller -
“It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.”
-- Helen Keller -
“THE most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me”
-- Helen Keller -
“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.”
-- Helen Keller -
“The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.”
-- Helen Keller -
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“There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
“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.”
-- Helen Keller -
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