30 Inspiring Helen Keller Quotes

1. “Sorrow is like the quieting caress of the dark. It veils the too glaring light of material day, and lets our minds behold the spiritual stars the sun hid from us.”

2. “We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world—the company of those who have known suffering. When it seems that our sorrow is too great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy-hearted into which our grief has given us entrance, and, inevitably, we will feel about us their arms, their sympathy, their understanding.”

3. “When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

4. “New sorrows teach new courage. Time makes the bitterest pain to ‘blossom like Aaron’s rod with flowers.’”

5. “Death comes to those we love, and it seems impossible that in the face of our dark grief, the sun should shine, birds should sing, men and women should go on laughing and living, and treading all the multitudinous sunny paths of normal life. But, before grief came upon us, we lived and laughed while others sorrowed, and hard as it is to believe, we shall live and laugh again. For that is the way of life.”

6. “Optimism that does not count the cost is like a house builded on sand. A man must understand evil and be acquainted with sorrow before he can write himself an optimist and expect others to believe that he has reason for the faith that is in him.”

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1. “So I want to say to those who are trying to learn to speak and those who are teaching them: 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—a delight in climbing rugged paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime slip backward—if the road was always smooth and pleasant”

2. “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.”

3. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.”

4. “Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another’s pain, life is not in vain.”

5. “‘Tomorrow!’ What possibilities there are in that word. No matter how discouraging today, how gloomy with dark clouds, with terrors and illness and death, there’s always Tomorrow, with its promise of better things. Let us think then of Death as but one more tomorrow, filled with infinite promise and fulfillment.”

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

7. “To keep on trying in spite of disappointment and failure is the only way to keep young and brave. Failures become victories if they make us wise-hearted.”

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1. “Woe, indeed, is the heritage of those who walk sad-thoughted and downcast through this radiant, soul-delighting earth, blind to its beauty and deaf to its music, and of those who call evil good, and good evil, and put darkness for light, and light for darkness.”

2. “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. As sinners stand up in meeting and testify to the goodness of God, so one who is called afflicted may rise up in gladness of conviction and testify to the goodness of life.”

3. “Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free. Once I knew only darkness and stillness. Now I know hope and joy.”

4. “… although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail.”

5. “Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.”

6. “One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”

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1. “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

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

3. “I believe it is a sacred duty to encourage ourselves and others; to hold the tongue from any unhappy word against God’s world, because no man has any right to complain of a universe which God made good, and which thousands of men have striven to keep good.”

4. “It is interesting to observe the differences in the hands of people. They show all kinds of vitality, energy, stillness, and cordiality.”

5. “I see the clouds part slowly, and I hear a cry of protest against the bigot.”

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1. “I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and everyone, and make that best a part of my life. 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.”

2. “Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. Sometime, somewhere, somehow we shall find that which we seek. We shall speak, yes, and sing, too, as God intended we should speak and sing.”

3. “And I, too, may construct my better world, for I am a child of God, an inheritor of a fragment of the Mind that created all worlds.”

4. “The Bible gives me a deep, comforting sense that ‘things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal.’”

5. “Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea, and sky, but also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts, ‘the source and center of all minds, their only point of rest.’”

6. “True faith is not a fruit of security, it is the ability to blend mortal fragility with the inner strength of the Spirit.”

Great Writings by Helen Keller

The quotes in this are taken from the following sources:

A Supplementary Account of Helen Keller’s Life and Education

“This I Believe”

“The Simplest Way to Be Happy”

“Speech at the Wright-Humason School, New York City, Winter 1921”

“The Open Door”

Optimism

We Bereaved

The World I Live In

The Story of My Life

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