Top 400 Helen Keller Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “He who is content with what has been done is an obstacle in the path of progress.”

— Helen Keller

302. “Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.”

— Helen Keller

303. “There is in the blind as in the seeing an Absolute which gives truth to what we know to be true, order to what is orderly, beauty to the beautiful, touchableness to what is tangible.”

— Helen Keller

304. “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

305. “You are amazed at all the things you know which are not on the examination paper.”

— Helen Keller

306. “Always make the most of every sense; glory in all the pleasure and beauty which the world reveals to you.”

— Helen Keller

307. “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.”

— Helen Keller

308. “More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.”

— Helen Keller

309. “The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel.”

— Helen Keller

310. “Once it was necessary that the people should multiply and be fruitful if the race was to survive. But now to preserve the race it is necessary that people hold back the power of propagation.”

— Helen Keller

311. “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.”

— Helen Keller

312. “I cannot remember how I felt when the light went out of my eyes. I suppose I felt it was always night and perhaps I wondered why the day did not come.”

— Helen Keller

313. “Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.”

— Helen Keller

314. “What is more exhilarating than to make your staunch little boat, obedient to your will and muscle, go skimming lightly over glistening, tilting waves, and to feel the steady, imperious surge of the water!”

— Helen Keller

315. “Let pessimism once take hold of the mind, and life is all topsy-turvy, all vanity and vexation of spirit. There is no cure for individual or social disorder, except in forgetfulness and annihilation.”

— Helen Keller

316. “Even as the roots, shut in the darksome earth, Share in the tree-top’s joyance, and conceive Of sunshine and wide air and winged things, By sympathy of nature, so do I.”

— Helen Keller

317. “We betray ourselves into smallness when we think the little choices of each day are trivial.”

— Helen Keller

318. “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.”

— Helen Keller

319. “For my part, I wish, with Mr. Howells, that the literature of the past might be purged of all that is ugly and barbarous in it, although I should object as much as any one to having these great works weakened or falsified.”

— Helen Keller

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

— Helen Keller

321. “I cannot but say a word and look my disapproval when I hear that my country is spending millions for war and war engines-more, I have heard, than twice as much as the entire public school system costs the nation.”

— Helen Keller

322. “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.”

— Helen Keller

323. “Thus it is that my friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges, and enabled me to walk serene and happy in the shadow cast by my deprivation.”

— Helen Keller

324. “I was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, a little town of northern Alabama.”

— Helen Keller

325. “No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.”

— Helen Keller

326. “The poets have taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. 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 our senses.”

— Helen Keller

327. “I grow more and more suspicious of the political powers that take men away from their work and set them shooting one another.”

— Helen Keller

328. “Is it not true, then, that my life with all its limitations touches at many points the life of the World Beautiful? Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.”

— Helen Keller

329. “My optimism is grounded in two worlds, myself and what is about me. I demand that the world be good, and lo, it obeys. I proclaim the world good, and facts range themselves to prove my proclamation overwhelmingly true.”

— Helen Keller

330. “The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy, that when I clasped their frosty finger-tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm.”

— Helen Keller

331. “The few who profit from the labor of the masses want to organize the workers into an army which will protect the interests of the capitalists.”

— Helen Keller

332. “Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design. But we keep on trying because we know that others have succeeded, and we are not willing to acknowledge defeat.”

— Helen Keller

333. “Rebuffed, but always persevering; self-reproached, but ever regaining faith; undaunted, tenacious, the heart of man labors toward immeasurably distant goals.”

— Helen Keller

334. “True, they were broken and stammering syllables; but they were human speech. My soul, conscious of new strength, came out of bondage, and was reaching through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and all faith.”

— Helen Keller

335. “I don’t give a damn about semi-radicals!”

— Helen Keller

336. “No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars.”

— Helen Keller

337. “The continued lynchings and other crimes against negroes, whether in New England or the South, and unspeakable political exponents of white supremacy, according to all recorded history, augur ill for America’s future.”

— Helen Keller

338. “Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves – and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.”

— Helen Keller

339. “At first I was rather unwilling to study Latin grammar. It seemed absurd to waste time analyzing every word I came across – noun, genitive, singular, feminine – when its meaning was quite plain. I thought I might just as well describe my pet in order to know it – order, vertebrate; division, quadruped; class, mammalia; genus, felinus; species, cat; individual, Tabby. But as I got deeper into the subject, I became more interested, and the beauty of the language delighted me.”

— Helen Keller

340. “I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune with one’s thoughts.”

— Helen Keller

341. “The danger of having the Constitution twisted and misconstrued to support vested interests and prejudices must be guarded against if American democracy is to maintain a progressive character.”

— Helen Keller

342. “If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.”

— Helen Keller

343. “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.”

— Helen Keller

344. “Serious harm, I am afraid, has been wrought to our generation by fostering the idea that they would live secure in a permanent order of things.”

— Helen Keller

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

— Helen Keller

346. “Truly I have looked in the very heart of darkness and refused to yield to its paralyzing influence, but in spirit I am one of those who walk the morning.”

— Helen Keller

347. “When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind written tests and examinations, one’s brain becomes encumbered with a lot of bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use.”

— Helen Keller

348. “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!”

— Helen Keller

349. “How futile are words in the ears of those who mourn.”

— Helen Keller

350. “First they ask me to tell the life of the child who is mother to the woman. Then they make me my own daughter and ask for an account of grown-up sensations. Finally I am requested to write about my dreams, and thus I become an anachronical grandmother; for it is the special privilege of old age to relate dreams.”

— Helen Keller