+60 Helen Keller Quotes to Inspire Courage, Hope, and the Power of Perseverance
- June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968
- American
- Author, educator, human rights activist
- Although she lost her sight and hearing due to an illness in her childhood, she engaged in various social activities, such as supporting the visually and hearing impaired and promoting women’s rights.
- “Life is either a great adventure or nothing.”
- “Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.”
- “As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”
- “People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.”
- “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.”
- “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”
- “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.”
- “Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.”
- “No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.”
- “Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.”
- “We can do anything we want to if we stick to it long enough.”
- “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.”
- “My share of the work may be limited, but the fact that it is work makes it precious.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “It’s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.”
- “Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.”
- “College isn’t the place to go for ideas.”
- “Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.”
- “The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.”
- “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.”
- “We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.”
- “Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.”
- “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.”
- “To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.”
- “The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”
- “True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”
- “Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.”
- “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.”
- “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”
- “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”
- “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”
- “While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.”
- “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.”
- “What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.”
- “Knowledge is love and light and vision.”
- “There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!”
- “Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.”
- “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.”
- “It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.”
- “Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.”
- “No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.”
- “One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”
- “The highest result of education is tolerance.”
- “What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.”
- “Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”
- “The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.”
- “The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.”
- “So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.”
- “No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.”
- “All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.”
- “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
- “I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.”
- “We may have found a cure for most evils; but we have found no remedy for the worst of them all, the apathy of human beings.”
- “When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.”