Helen Keller Quotes - Page 15

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

  Helen Keller

  Acceptance, Men, Thinking

  Helen Keller (2012). “The World I Live In and Optimism: A Collection of Essays”, p.99, Courier Corporation

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• Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight. True education combines intellect, beauty, goodness, and the greatest of these is goodness. When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

  Helen Keller

  Miracle, Faces, Goodness

  Helen Keller (1920). “Out of the Dark: Essays, Lectures, and Addresses on Physical and Social Vision”

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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.

  Helen Keller

  Happiness, Philosophy, Sisterhood

  Helen Keller (2012). “Optimism”, p.3, Simon and Schuster

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• 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.

  Helen Keller

  Wise, Disappointment, Brave

  Helen Keller (2000). “To Love this Life: Quotations”, p.107, American Foundation for the Blind

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• I look upon the whole world as my fatherland, and every war has to me the horror of a family feud.

  Helen Keller

  War, Looks, Feuds

  54 Copy quote

• No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.

  Helen Keller

  Nature, Loss, Men

  Helen Keller (2012). “The World I Live In and Optimism: A Collection of Essays”, p.99, Courier Corporation

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• During the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out. If we have once seen, "the day is ours, and what the day has shown."

  Helen Keller

  Flower, Green Fields, Sky

  Helen Keller (2016). “The Story of My Life”, p.9, Om Books International

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• So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good.

  Helen Keller

  Friendship, Inspiring, Memories

  Helen Keller (2000). “To Love this Life: Quotations”, p.33, American Foundation for the Blind

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• Change may be the vitalizing wind blowing through the house of life, but it is not an abiding force. We need permanent things to soak peace into us as well as progress - the beauty of the earth, seedtime and harvest, the smiles of lovers, the joy of the young in being alive, pride in craftsmanship. Why, oh why must we let ourselves forget these lasting treasures in an age of consuming ambition, speed madness and accumulated goods that leave us no chance to live? If we cannot be contented with a little no wealth will ever satisfy us.

  Helen Keller

  Ambition, Pride, Wind Blowing

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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.

  Helen Keller

  Family, Philosophy, Optimism

  Helen Keller (2010). “The World I Live In and Optimism: A Collection of Essays”, p.102, Courier Corporation

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• Personally I do not believe in a national agency devoted only to the negro blind because in spirit and principle I am against all segregation, and the blind already have difficulties enough without being cramped and harassed by social barriers.

  Helen Keller

  Believe, Agency, Principles

  Helen Keller (2000). “To Love this Life: Quotations”, p.97, American Foundation for the Blind

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• Ignorance, poverty, and greed must disappear so that light can prevail in all places.

  Helen Keller

  Ignorance, Light, Greed

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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.

  Helen Keller

  Struggle, Fall, Victory

  Helen Keller (2016). “The Story of My Life”, p.62, Om Books International

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• 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.

  Helen Keller

  Children, Distance, Fall

  Helen Keller (2003). “The Story of My Life: The Restored Edition”, p.81, Modern Library

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• The highest thinkers of the ages, the seers of the tribes and the nations, have been optimists.

  Helen Keller

  Age, Tribes, Maldives

  Helen Keller (2011). “To Live, to Think, to Hope: Inspirational Quotes by Helen Keller”, p.134, Matthew Gordon

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• I have an unshakable belief that mankind's higher nature is on the whole still dormant. The greatest souls reveal excellencies of mind and heart which their lesser fellows possess-hidden, it is true, but there all the same.

  Helen Keller

  Heart, Soul, Mind

  Helen Keller (1957). “The Open Door”, Garden City, N.Y. : Doubleday

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• Next to a leisurely walk I enjoy a spin on my tandem bicycle. It is splendid to feel the wind blowing in my face and the springy motion of my iron steed. The rapid rush through the air gives me a delicious sense of strength and buoyancy, and the exercise makes my pulse dance and my heart sing.

  Helen Keller

  Inspirational, Healing, Heart

  Helen Keller (2016). “The Story of My Life”, p.77, Om Books International

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• Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.

  Helen Keller

  Ideas, Defeat, Tyranny

  "Fighting the Fires of Hate: America and the Nazi Book Burnings" exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 13, 2003.

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

  Helen Keller

  Heart, Men, Self

  Helen Keller (1967). “Helen Keller, her Socialist years: writings and speeches”

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• Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.

  Helen Keller

  Dream, New York, Real

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• I could never stay long enough on the shore; the tang of the untainted, fresh, and free sea air was like a cool, quieting thought.

  Helen Keller

  Beach, Ocean, Air

  Helen Keller (2016). “The Story of My Life”, p.32, Om Books International

  62 Copy quote

• I never fight, except against difficulties.

  Helen Keller

  Fighting, Helping Others, People

  52 Copy quote

• Happiness rarely keeps company with an empty stomach

  Helen Keller

  Empty, Stomach, Company

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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.

  Helen Keller

  Sweet, Book, Here I Am

  Helen Keller (2012). “The Story of My Life”, p.74, Courier Corporation

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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.

  Helen Keller

  Summer, Sweet, Memories

  9 Copy quote

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