Helen Keller

Helen Keller

Author, Activist

Helen Keller was a pioneering author and activist who overcame deafness and blindness to advocate for education and social justice.

Inspirational Life Heart Motivational Men Eye
Born
June 27, 1880
Died
June 1, 1968
Quotes
454
Rank
#97

Quote collection

Helen Keller quotes (page 14 of 23)

454 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.

Helen Keller Author, Activist
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"Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. The odors of fruits waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far away."

Summer Sweet Memories
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"If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life. If, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing."

Happiness Philosophy Sisterhood
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"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."

Education Life Lesson Acceptance
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"Reality even when it is sad is better than illusions. Illusions are at the mercy of any winds that blow. Real happiness must come from within, from a fixed purpose and faith in one's fellow men."

Real Blow Men
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"If we do not like our work, and do not try to get happiness out of it, we are a menace to our profession as well as to ourselves."

Work Trying Menace
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"Long before I learned to do a sum in arithmetic or describe the shape of the earth, Miss Sullivan had taught me to find beauty in the fragrant woods, in every blade of grass, and in the curves and dimples of my baby sister's hand."

Baby Curves Hands
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"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."

Sweet Book Here I Am
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"I have found out that though the ways in which I can make myself useful are few, yet the work open to me is endless."

Tragedy Apathy Way
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"I feel the delightful, velvety texture of a flower, and discover its remarkable convolutions; and something of the miracle of Nature is revealed to me."

Flower Miracle Texture
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"If we spend the time we waste in sighing for the perfect golden fruit in fulfilling the conditions of its growth, happiness will come, must come. It is guaranteed in the very laws of the universe. If it involves some chastening and renunciation, well, the fruit will be all the sweeter for this touch of holiness."

Law Perfect Growth
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"I fall, I stand still... I trudge on. I gain a little... I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory."

Struggle Fall Victory
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"The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy."

Family Philosophy Optimism
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"He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower."

Age Spirit Widowers
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"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."

Hands People Joy
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"I can see in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden."

Dark Vision Golden
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"If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought."

Perfect Greek Musical
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"One's life story cannot be told with complete veracity. A true autobiography would have to be written in states of mind, emotions, heartbeats, smiles and tears; not in months and years, or physical events. Life is marked off on the soul by feelings, not by dates."

Years Soul Feelings
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"The best educated human being is the one who understands most about the life in which he is placed."

Education Awareness Educated
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"Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents of life, its outer trappings. The great, enduring realities are love of service. Joy is the holy fire that keeps our purpose warm and our intelligence aglow. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulty."

Happiness Success Lying
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