Helen Keller Quotes

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 beautiful and wilful conviction, it carries itself in the face of all opposition. I am never discouraged by absence of good. I never can be argued into hopelessness.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness. The things I have learned and the things I have been taught seem of ridiculously little importance compared with their "large loves and heavenly charities."

"Love is something like the clouds that were in the sky before the sun came out, " she replied. Then in simpler words than these, which at the time I could not have understood, she explained; " You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love, you would not be happy or want to play."

"Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. "Light! give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour."

It is the possibility of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case of a poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens: but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened before us.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope or confidence.

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.

Self-culture has been loudly and boastfully proclaimed as sufficient for all our ideals of perfection. But if we listen to the best men and women everywhere ... they will say that 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.

You are amazed at all the things you know which are not on the examination paper.

One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think.

عندما يغلق باب للسعادة، يفتح آخر، ولكن في كثير من الأحيان ننظر طويلا الى الباب المغلق الى الدرجة التي لا نرى فيها الباب الذي فتح لنا.

[...] although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to coöperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life.

Ketika satu pintu tertutup, pintu lain akan terbuka. Tetapi kadang-kadang kita terlalu lama menatap pintu tertutup itu sehingga kita tidak melihat pintu yang telah terbuka untuk kita.

With a feeling of intense disgust you kick the mass of rubbish into a corner and go home, your head full of revolutionary schemes to abolish the divine right of professors to ask questions without the consent of the questioned.