Helen Keller Quotes

Many people have a wrong of idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not obtained through a self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Knowledge is love and light and vision.

...So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others’ ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.

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.

Only by contact with evil could I have learned to feel by contrast the beauty of truth and love and goodness.

i have heard of the stars, of the play of light on the waves
these i would like to see
but far more than sight
i wish for my ears to be opened
the voice of a friend
the imaginations of mozart
life without these is darker by far
than blindness

I sometimes wonder if the hand is not more sensitive to the beauties of sculpture than the eye. I should think the wonderful rhythmical flow of lines and curves could be more subtly felt than seen. Be this as it may, I know I can feel the heart-throbs of the ancient Greeks in their marble gods and goddesses.

We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.

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.

I trust, and nothing that happens disturbs my trust.

I was stringing beads of different sizes in symmetrical groups — two large beads, three small ones, and so on. I had made many mistakes, and Miss Sullivan had pointed them out again and again with gentle patience. Finally I noticed a very obvious error in the sequence and for an instant I concentrated my attention on the lesson and tried to think how I should have arranged the beads. Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, “Think.” In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea.

"For he will smile and give you, with unflinching courtesy,
prayers, trappings, letters, uniforms and orders, photographs, kindness, valor and advice,
And do it with such quiet grace and gentle meekness that you will know you have the whole of him mapped out, pinned down, easy to understand. And so you have it. All things but the heart.
The heart he kept hidden till the end, Hidden from the picklocks of biographers."
- Steven Vincent Benét

Indeed, everything that could hum, or buzz, or sing, or bloom had a part in my education — noisy-throated frogs, katydids and crickets held in my hand until, forgetting their embarrassment, they trilled their reedy note, little downy chickens and wildflowers, the dogwood blossoms, meadow-violets and budding fruit trees. I felt the bursting cotton-bolls and fingered their soft fiber and fuzzy seeds; I felt the low soughing of the wind through the cornstalks, the silky rustling of the long leaves, and the indignant snort of my pony...

Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, ‘inhale great draughts of space,’ wonder, wonder at the wind’s unwearied activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul from the tactual sonorities of a thousand branches and tumbling waters. How can the world be shriveled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch, is faithful to its service? I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose between the sense of sight and that of touch, I would not part with the warm, endearing contact of human hands…

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.