Quotes by Helen Keller

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight and no vision.

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 manmade world.

A beam from the everlasting sun of God.Rude and unresponsive are the stones;Yet in them divine things lie concealed;I hear their imprisoned chant:–“We are fragments of the universe,Chips of the rock whereon God laid the foundation of the world:

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

The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither mens rights nor womens rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.

I realized that the wonder is not that conditions are so bad, but that humanity has advanced so far in spite of them. & now I am in the fight to change things. I may be a dreamer, but dreamers are necessary to make facts!

No pessimist discovered the secrets of the stars or sailed to an uncharted land or opened a new heaven to the human spirit

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security 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 exposure.

The day is ours, and what the day has shown.

i also dislike people who try to talk down to my understanding. they are like people who when walking with you try to shorten their steps to suit yours, hypocrisy in both cases is equally exasperating.

Our favourite amusement during that winter was tobogganing. In places the shore of the lake rises abruptly from the waters edge. Down these steep slopes we used to coast. We would get on our toboggan, a boy would give us a shove, and off we went! Plunging through drifts, leaping hollows, swooping down upon the lake, we would shoot across its gleaming surface to the opposite bank. What joy! What exhilarating madness! For one wild, glad moment we snapped the chain that binds us to earth, and joining hands with the winds we felt ourselves divine!

I am no worshiper of cloth of any color, but I love the red flag and what it symbolizes to me and other Socialists. I have a red flag hanging in my study, and if I could I should gladly march with it past the office of the Times and let all the reporters and photographers make the most of the spectacle.

One painful duty fulfilled makes the next plainer and easier.

Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.

The highest result of education is tolerance

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.

Although the world is full of suffering it is full also of the overcoming of it.

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

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.

I thank God for my handicaps for through them I have found myself my work and my God.