104 Inspiring Helen Keller Quotes
Mark Twain once stated, “The two most interesting characters of the nineteenth-century are Napoleon and Helen Keller.” Unaffected by her own deafness and blindness, Helen Keller, born in 1880 in Tuscumbia, Alabama, presented a remarkable body of life’s work as a humanitarian, lecturer and author. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree and also received the highest civilian award in the United States, The Presidential Medal of Freedom. With great determination, she changed people’s view of the blind and deaf, and made great strides in American history.
The life of this true American icon (made famous by Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, and its adaptations for film and stage, The Miracle Worker) is celebrated on Helen Keller Day on June 27. This well-curated collection of quotes by this historic personality will truly inspire you.
Table of Contents
- Short Helen Keller Quotes
- Helen Keller Inspirational Quotes
- Famous Helen Keller Quotes
- Timeless Helen Keller Quotes About Love
- Powerful Helen Keller Quotes About Life
- Helen Keller Quotes About Death
- Helen Keller Christian Quotes
- Celebrate Helen Keller Day With These Beautiful Quotes
- Helen Keller Quotes On Images
Short Helen Keller Quotes
- Be happy with what you have while working for what you want.
- Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.
- Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
- The highest result of education is tolerance
- There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
- Never bend your head. Hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.
- What I’m looking for is not out there, it is in me.
- If you can dream it, you can do it. Η
- Literature is my Utopia.
- A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.
- Knowledge is love and light and vision.
- While they were saying it couldn’t be done, it was done.
- The most beautiful world is always entered through imagination.
- True friends never apart maybe in distance but never in heart.
- So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.
- I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!
- Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow.
- The mind is as big as the universe.
- The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility.
- Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.
- Words are the mind’s wings, are they not?
- Anything I have ever done that was ultimately worthwhile, initially scared me to death!
- The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life.
Helen Keller Inspirational Quotes
- A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn.
- Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.
- We can do anything we want as long as we stick to it long enough.
- To keep our faces toward change, and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate, is strength undefeatable.
- I am only one, but still I am one.I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do.
- Happiness does not come from without, it comes from within.
- Your success and happiness lie in you.
- Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
- The silent worker is imagination which decrees reality out of chaos.
- One painful duty fulfilled makes the next plainer and easier.
- Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than to outrun exposure. the fearful are caught as often as the bold.
- The world is not moved only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
- You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.
- Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
- For one wild, glad moment we snapped the chain that binds us to earth, and joining hands with the winds we felt ourselves divine.
- The richness of the human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome.
Famous Helen Keller Quotes
- I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light.
- Blindness separates people from things; deafness separates people from people.
- One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
- I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.
- Good friends walk in when the old ones walk out.
- Our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding.
- So much has been given to me I have not time to ponder over that which has been denied.
- I cannot see the lovely things with my eyes, but my mind can see them all, and so I am joyful all the day long.
- 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 for us.
- Until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each others welfare, social justice can never be attained.
- I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.
- People don’t like to think, if one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
- Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything good in the world.
- If the blind put their hands in God’s, they find their way more surely than those who see but have not faith or purpose.
- My fingers are tickled to delight by the soft ripple of a baby’s laugh…
- There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
- Silence sits immense upon my soul. Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, “There is joy in self-forgetfulness.”
Timeless Helen Keller Quotes About Love
- 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.
- Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.
- 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.
- Relationships are like Rome — difficult to start out, incredible during the prosperity of the ‘golden age’, and unbearable during the fall. Then, a new kingdom will come along and the whole process will repeat itself until you come across a kingdom like Egypt… that thrives, and continues to flourish. This kingdom will become your best friend, your soul mate, and your love.
- As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so sex with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
- In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness.
Powerful Helen Keller Quotes About Life
- Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.
- The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.
- We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.
- So long as you can sweeten another’s pain, life is not in vain.
- 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.
- It is always painful to set one’s self against tradition, especially against the conventions & prejudices that hedge about womanhood.
- 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.
- Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
- Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.
- Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
- When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.
- No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars or sailed an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.
- 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.
- It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.
- In the country one sees only nature’s fair works, and one’s soul is not saddened by the cruel struggle for mere existence that goes on in the crowded city.
Helen Keller Quotes About Death
- Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.
- We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world–the company of those who have known suffering.
- For three things I thank God every day of my life: thanks that he has vouchsafed me knowledge of his works; deep thanks that he has set in my darkness the lamp of faith; deep, deepest thanks that I have another life to look forward to–a life joyous with light and flowers and heavenly song.
Helen Keller Christian Quotes
- I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings.
- Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into light.
- The bible gives me a deep comforting sense that things seen are temporal, and things unseen are eternal.
- I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the colour and fragrance of a flower – the Light in my darkness, the Voice in my silence.
- Four things to learn in life: To think clearly without hurry or confusion; To love everybody sincerely; To act in everything with the highest motives; To trust God unhesitatingly.
- Unless we form the habit of going to the Bible in bright moments as well as in trouble, we cannot fully respond to its consolations because we lack equilibrium between light and darkness.
Celebrate Helen Keller Day With These Beautiful Quotes
Celebrated annually on June 27.
- True, I cannot see the stars scattered like gold dust in the heavens, but stars just as bright shine in my soul.
- I thank God for my handicaps. For through them, I have found myself, my work and my God.
- There is beauty in everything, even in silence and darkness.
- There is no better way to thank God for your sight than by giving a helping hand to someone in the dark.
- There is joy in self-forgetfulness. 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.
- Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.
- To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.
- They took away what should have been my eyes (but I remembered Milton’s Paradise). They took away what should have been my ears, (Beethoven came and wiped away my tears) They took away what should have been my tongue, (but I had talked with god when I was young) He would not let them take away my soul, possessing that I still possess the whole.
- I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a man-made world.
- 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.
- Blind people are just like seeing people in the dark. The loss of sight does not impair the qualities of mind and heart.
- I have an unshakable belief that mankind’s higher nature is on the whole still dormant. The greatest souls reveal excellencies of mind and heart which their lesser fellows possess-hidden, it is true, but there all the same.
- My work was practice, practice, practice. Discouragement and weariness cast me down frequently; but the next moment the thought that I should soon be at home and show my loved ones what I had accomplished spurred me on, and I eagerly looked forward to their pleasure in my achievement.
Helen Keller Quotes On Images
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