Helen Keller

Quotes

• “Since my seventeenth year, I have tried to live according to the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg. By "church" he did not...”
• “It lets us into the soul of things and teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the o...”
• “Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though no...”
• “The only real blind person at Christmas-time is he who has not Christmas in his heart. We sightless children had the bes...”
• “We have found that our great philosophers and our great men of action are optimists. So, too, our most potent men of let...”
• “But in a little measure my small voice of individual experience does join in the declaration of philosophy that the good...”
• “I began to read the Bible long before I could understand it. Now it seems strange to me that there should have been a ti...”
• “Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the world at a standstill. The...”
• “Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious d...”
• “I see the clouds part slowly, and I hear a cry of protest against the bigot. The restraining hand of tolerance is laid u...”
• “It is curious to observe what different ideals of happiness people cherish, and in what singular places they look for th...”
• “Ruth is so loyal and gentle-hearted, we cannot help loving her, as she stands with the reapers amid the waving corn. Her...”
• “At the People's College in Fort Scott, Kansas, my mother met Arthur Le Sueur, who with Helen Keller, Eugene Debs, and Ch...”
• “I read "King Lear" soon after "Macbeth," and I shall never forget the feeling of horror when I came to the scene in whic...”
• “Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and al...”
• “The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important, than those of blindness. Deafness is a much...”
• “The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I ...”
• “I, too, can work, and because I love to labor with my head and my hands, I am an optimist in spite of all. I used to thi...”
• “To what is good I open the doors of my being, and jealously shut them against what is bad. Such is the force of this bea...”
• “No history of the world can be complete which does not mention Mary Helen Keller... whose overcoming of her blindness an...”
• “If the light were not in your eyes, dear Mr. Brooks, you would understand better how happy your little Helen was when he...”
• “Letter to Dr. James Kerr Love (1910), published in Helen Keller in Scotland: a personal record written by herself (1933)...”
• “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avo...”
• “I am charmed with your book - enchanted. You are a wonderful creature, the most wonderful in the world - you and your ot...”
• “Some people do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions; and conclusions are not always pleasant. Th...”
• “She will live on, one of the few, the immortal names not born to die. Her spirit will endure as long as man can read and...”
• “I need not go into any particulars about Helen Keller. She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare,...”
• “No one is more welcome to the House than Helen Keller, whom we love. And she has a genius for finding words for great tr...”
• “The Open Door (1957) This quotation is often contracted into: Security is mostly a superstition... Life is either a dari...”
• “No doubt the reason is that character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffer...”
• “To know the history of philosophy is to know that the highest thinkers of the ages, the seers of the tribes and the nati...”
• “Capitalism will inevitably find itself face to face with a starving multitude of unemployed workers demanding food or de...”
• “The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pe...”
• “It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy ...”
• “It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disas...”
• “Address to the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf at Mt. Airy, Philadelphia, Pennsylvani...”
• “Theodore Zeldin in An Intimate History of Humanity (1994) This quote seems to obviously refer to Helen Adams Keller, but...”
• “We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and...”
• “It is the possibility of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case ...”
• “There are moments when I feel that the Shylocks, the Judases, and even the Devil, are broken spokes in the great wheel o...”
• “Optimism, then, is a fact within my own heart. But as I look out upon life, my heart meets no contradiction. The outward...”
• “Many persons have a wrong of idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but ...”
• “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the on...”
• “Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten anoth...”
• “Virgil is serene and lovely like a marble Apollo in the moonlight; Homer is a beautiful, animated youth in the full sunl...”
• “As quoted in the Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings exhibit at the United States Holocaust M...”
• “I demand that the world be good, and lo, it obeys. I proclaim the world good, and facts range themselves to prove my pro...”
• “Who shall dare let his incapacity for hope or goodness cast a shadow upon the courage of those who bear their burdens as...”
• “William James, in a letter to Keller (1908), published in The Thought and Character of William James (1935) Vol. 2, by R...”
• “Guideposts (June 1956); also in the second edition of Light in My Darkness (2000), an edited and expanded revision of he...”