Helen Keller Quotes (124 Quotes)

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 touch.

Ideas without action are worthless.

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

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

No loss by flood and lightening, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed

I have often been asked, Do not people bore you I do not understand quite what that means. I suppose the calls of the stupid and curious, especially of newspaper reporters, are always inopportune.

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

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

True happiness... is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

So long as I confine my activities to social services and the blind, the newspapers compliment me extravagantly, calling me an 'arch-priest of the sightless' and 'wonder woman'. But when I discuss poverty and the industrial system under which we live that is a different matter.

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.

Fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present.

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

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.

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

I have said all along that this clause is probably contrary to the Geneva Conventions. Parliament should now review its decision and re-amend article 9 of the Military Penal Code.

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.

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

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

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

One should never count the years -- one should instead count one's interests. I have kept young trying never to lose my childhood sense of wonderment. I'm glad I still have a vivid curiosity about the world I live in.

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.

. . . militarism . . . is one of the chief bulwarks of capitalism, and the day that militarism is undermined, capitalism will fail.

The million little things that drop into your hands, The small opportunities each day brings, He leaves us free to use or abuse, And goes unchanging along His silent way.

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.

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

There is much in the Bible against which every instinct of my being rebels, so much that I regret the necessity which has compelled me to read it through from beginning to end.

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.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

When one door to happiness closes, another opens. But often we look so long at the closed door we do not see the one which has been opened to us.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Knowledge is love and light and vision.

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.