Helen Keller

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.

Once I knew only darkness and stillness... my life was without past or future... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

Look the world straight in the eye.

Your success and happiness lie in you.

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.

Four things to learn in life: To think clearly without hurry or confusion; To love everybody sincerely; To act in everything with the highest motives; To trust God unhesitatingly.

There is beauty in everything, even in silence and darkness.

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.

My friends have made the story of my life.

A bend in the road is not the end of the road…Unless you fail to make the turn.

I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate--that we could mold our lives into any form we pleased... I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life's struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance on a subject I knew little about... I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone.

So much has been given me I have no time to ponder over that which has been denied.