Helen Keller

“When I recollect the treasure of friendship that has been bestowed upon me I withdraw all charges against life. If much has been denied me, much, very much has been given. So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart I shall say that life is good.”

“Poverty is the fundamental cause of most of the physical, moral and economic ills of humanity.”

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

“When all you can feel are the shadows, turn your face towards the sun.”

“I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present.”

“I do not remember a time since I have been capable of loving books that I have not loved Shakespeare.”

“True friends never apart maybe in distance but never in heart”

“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.”

“I have found life so beautiful.”

“When one doors closes, another door opens.”

“It is better to have no sight than it is to have no vision.”

“Even if you have a problem, you don't need to be one.”

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”

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

“When indeed shall we learn that we are all related one to the other, that we are all members of one body?”

“I can see in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden.”

“One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”

“I believe war is the inevitable fruit of our economic system.”

“Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.”

“For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.”

“If I could have only one of my senses then I would choose hearing, Then I wouldn't feel so all alone.”

“Only in quietness do we possess our own minds and discover the resources of the Inner Life.”

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

“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.”

“What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness!”

“It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing.”

“In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. 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.”

“I look upon the whole world as my fatherland, and every war has to me the horror of a family feud.”

“A person who is severely impaired never knows his hidden sources of strength until he is treated like a normal human being and encouraged to shape his own life.”

“To get Congress to do anything.”

“Gullibility is the key to all adventures. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he who gets the most out of life.”

“Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge - broad, deep knowledge - is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.”

“The highest thinkers of the ages, the seers of the tribes and the nations, have been optimists.”

“A child must feel the flush of victory and the heart-sinking of disappointment before he takes with a will to the tasks distasteful to him and resolves to dance his way through a dull routine of textbooks.”

“I have made my limitations tools of learning and true joy.”

“When one door closes, another one opens, but sometimes we wait too long looking at the closed door, and never realize that another door has been opened.”

“I fall, I stand still... I trudge on. I gain a little... I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory.”

“As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”

“Your success and happiness lie in you.”

“So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,' and a 'modern miracle.' But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics-that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world-that is a different matter!”

“Literature is my Utopia”

“Everybody talks, nobody listens. Good listeners are as rare as white crows.”

“As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.”

“Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.”

“I do not like the world as it is; so I am trying to make it a little more as I want it.”

“Making a mistake is falling down; failure is not getting up again.”

“The world is sown with good; but unless I turn my glad thoughts into practical living and till my own field. I cannot reap a kernel of the good.”

“I have walked with people whose eyes are full of light but who see nothing in sea or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. It were far better to sail forever in the night of blindness with sense, and feeling, and mind, than to be content with the mere act of seeing. The only lightless dark is the night of darkness in ignorance and insensibility.”

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

“This great republic is a mockery of freedom as long as you are doomed to dig and sweat to earn a miserable living while the masters enjoy the fruit of your toil.”