Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world.
—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
Topics: Character
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.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Sadness
Life is a chronicle of friendship.
Friends create the world anew each day.
Without their loving care, courage would not
suffice to keep hearts strong for life.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Friendship
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
—Helen Keller
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Royalty, Kings, Queens
Be of good cheer. Do not think of today’s failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. 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.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Perseverance, The Future, Resolve, Tomorrow, Endurance
Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Success, Success & Failure
Literature is my utopia.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Literature
The idea of brotherhood redawns upon the world with a broader significance than the narrow association of members in a sect or creed.
—Helen Keller
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.
—Helen Keller
It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.
—Helen Keller
Self-pity is our worst enemy, and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Hedonism, Self-Discovery, Self-Pity
While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Achieving
A man can’t make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Men
There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Courage
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
Topics: Sorrow
The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage,—the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience. Tolerance is the first principal of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Tolerance
We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Persistence, Resolve, Perseverance, Endurance, Success
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Appreciation, Wonder, Acceptance, Happiness, Blessings, Gratitude
I know that faith made my life possible and that of many others like me… Reason hardly warranted Anne Sullivan’s attempt to transform a little half-human, half-animal, deaf-blind child into a complete human being. Neither science nor philosophy had set such a goal, but faith, the eye of love did. I did not know I had a soul. Then the God in a wise heart drew me out of nothingness with cords of human love and the life belt of language, and lo, I found myself. In my doubly shadowed world faith gives me a reason for trying to draw harmony out of a marred instrument. Faith is not a cushion for me to fall back upon; it is my working energy.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Faith
Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession.
—Helen Keller
A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.
—Helen Keller
As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Mind, Joy, Religion, Sex, Selfishness, Vision
We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond the senses.
—Helen Keller
Doubts and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Uncertainty, Doubt
The million little things that drop into our hands, the small opportunities each day brings He leaves us free to use or abuse and goes unchanging along His silent way.
—Helen Keller
Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within.
—Helen Keller
Topics: Contentment, Happiness
It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference.
—Helen Keller
Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life.
—Helen Keller
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jane Addams American Social Reformer
- Jeannette Rankin American Politician
- Ernest Hemingway American Author
- Caroline Kennedy American Attorney, Diplomat
- Washington Irving American Author
- William F. Buckley, Jr. American Conservative Editor
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman American Feminist, Writer
- Peter McWilliams American Author
- Bill Bryson American Humorist
- Robert Fulghum American Unitarian Universalist Author
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