Helen Keller Quotes

219 Sourced Quotes

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.

Helen Keller
Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.

Helen Keller
Many of us delude ourselves with the thought that if we could stand in the lot of our more fortunate neighbor, we could live better, happier and more useful lives.... It is my experience that unless we can succeed in our present position, we could not succeed in any other.

Helen Keller
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.

Helen Keller
This world is so full of care and sorrow that it is a gracious debt we owe to one another to discover the bright crystals of delight hidden in somber circumstances and irksome tasks.

Helen Keller
I believe war is the inevitable fruit of our economic system.

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

Helen Keller
I could never stay long enough on the shore; the tang of the untainted, fresh, and free sea air was like a cool, quieting thought.

Helen Keller
The only real blind person at Christmas-time is he who has not Christmas in his heart. We sightless children had the best of eyes that day in our hearts and in our finger-tips. We were glad from the child's necessity of being happy. The blind who have outgrown the child's perpetual joy can be children again on Christmas Day and celebrate in the midst of them who pipe and dance and sing a new song!

Helen Keller
What do I consider a teacher should be? One who breathes life into knowledge so that it takes new form in progress and civilization.

Helen Keller
If we spend the time we waste in sighing for the perfect golden fruit in fulfilling the conditions of its growth, happiness will come, must come. It is guaranteed in the very laws of the universe. If it involves some chastening and renunciation, well, the fruit will be all the sweeter for this touch of holiness....

Helen Keller
World peace will never come until the passion of supremacy is combated.

Helen Keller
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

Helen Keller
Poverty is the fundamental cause of most of the physical, moral and economic ills of humanity.

Helen Keller
My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges.

Helen Keller
People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

Helen Keller
I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings.

Helen Keller
Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.

Helen Keller
Knowledge is power." Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge - broad, deep knowledge - is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man's progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.

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

Helen Keller
No doubt the reason is that character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

Helen Keller
God himself is not secure, having given man dominion over his work.

Helen Keller
Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.

Helen Keller
I demand that the world be good, and lo, it obeys. I proclaim the world good, and facts range themselves to prove my proclamation overwhelmingly true.

Helen Keller
Joy is a spiritual element that gives vicissitudes unity and significance.

Helen Keller
The chief handicap of the blind is not blindness, but the attitude of seeing people towards them.

Helen Keller
The mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that 'w-a-t-e-r' meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, joy, set it free!

Helen Keller
Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life.

Helen Keller
Thus I came up out of Egypt and stood before Sinai, and a power divine touched my spirit and gave it sight, so that I beheld many wonders. And from the sacred mountain I heard a voice which said, 'Knowledge is love and light and vision.

Helen Keller
During the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out. If we have once seen, "the day is ours, and what the day has shown."

Helen Keller