Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.
Category: Helen Keller
Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, political activist, and lecturer.
I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.
One cannot consent to creep when one has an impulse to soar.
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.
Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.
I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
Many scholars forget … that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. … very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The mind drops them as a branch drops its overripe fruit.
… my soul stood erect, exultant, envisioning a new world where the light of justice for every individual will be unclouded.
The task of writing an autobiography is a difficult one. When I try to classify my earliest impressions, I find that fact and fancy look alike across the years that link the past with the present. The woman paints the child’s experiences in her own fantasy. A few impressions stand out vividly from the first years of my life; but “the shadows of the prison-house are on the rest.”
… 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.
Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others’ lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process. But whatever the process, the result is wonderful. Gradually from naming an object we advance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.
I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom they bring to all who read, but also for that knowledge which comes to others through their eyes and their ears.
It’s wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.
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.