Helen Keller
The true task is to unite and organize all workers...and it is the workers themselves who must secure freedom for themselves.Collection: Tasks
With every friend I love who has been taken into the brown bosom of the earth a part of me has been buried there; but their contribution to my being of happiness, strength and understanding remains to sustain me in an altered world.Collection: Friendship
Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every pessimist would keep the worlds at a standstill. The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains of joy in the world.Collection: Struggle
The bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction.Collection: Knowledge
Happiness is the final and perfect fruit of obedience to the laws of life.Collection: Law
When I recollect the treasure of friendship that has been bestowed upon me I withdraw all charges against life. If much has been denied me, much, very much has been given. So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart I shall say that life is good.Collection: Memories
Gullibility is the key to all adventures. The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he who gets the most out of life.Collection: Adventure
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.Collection: World
There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract, but not for the concrete.Collection: Abstract
Look the world straight in the eye.Collection: Motivational
Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.Collection: Inspirational
The greatest tragedy to befall a person is to have sight but lack vision.Collection: Sight
So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.Collection: Pain
The worst thing is to be born sighted but to lack vision.Collection: Vision
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.Collection: Writing
A man can't make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.Collection: Family
They took away what should have been my eyes (but I remembered Milton's Paradise). They took away what should have been my ears, (Beethoven came and wiped away my tears) They took away what should have been my tongue, (but I had talked with god when I was young) He would not let them take away my soul, possessing that I still possess the whole.Collection: Eye
The woman who works for a dollar a day has as much right as any other human being to say what the conditions of her work should be.Collection: Dollars
Sick or well, blind or seeing, bond or free, we are here for a purpose and however we are situated, we please God better with useful deeds than with many prayers or pious resignation. The temple or church is empty unless the good of life fills it . . . holy if only . . . we offer the only sacrifices ever commanded-the love that is stronger than hate and the faith that overcometh doubt.Collection: Life
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 and their understanding.Collection: Family
The clatter of a changing world is not pleasant, and those who have enjoyed the comforts and protection of the old order may be shocked and unhappy when they behold the vigorous young builders of a new world sweeping away their time-honored antiquities.Collection: Order
Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Light
I am a child of my generation, and I rejoice that I live in such splendidly disturbing times.Collection: Life
Smells are the fallen angels of the senses.Collection: Angel
If the blind put their hands in God's, they find their way more surely than those who see but have not faith or purpose.Collection: Hands
If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought.Collection: Perfect
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.Collection: Dream
My friends have made the story of my life.Collection: Healing
The worst calamity: 'To have eyes and fail to see.'Collection: Eye
Smell is a fallen angel.Collection: Angel
I think the degree of a nation's civilisation may be measured by the degree of enlightenment of its women.Collection: Thinking
Every modern war has had its roots in exploitation.Collection: War
I can see in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden.Collection: Dark
I take happiness very seriously. It is a creed, a philosophy and an objective.Collection: Philosophy
We should not think of conversion as the acceptance of a particular creed, but as a change of heart.Collection: Heart
We cannot freely and wisely choose the right way for ourselves unless we know both good and evil.Collection: Evil
What if in my waking hours a sound should ring through the silent halls of hearing? ... Would the bow and string tension of life snap? Would the heart over weighted with sudden joy stop beating for very excess of happiness?Collection: Happiness
Instead of being satisfied to alleviate suffering, we shall labor hard and continually to prevent it.Collection: Suffering
Love? Why ... it is what everybody feels for everybody else.Collection: Feels
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Lynching
Don't give me the peace that passeth understanding, give me understanding.Collection: Giving
Christmas Day is the festival of optimism.Collection: Christmas
I have found life so beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next. Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood between sincere men of all denominations.Collection: Men
We have prayed, we have coaxed, we have begged, for the vote, with the hope that men, out of chivalry, would bestow equal rights upon women and take them into partnership in the affairs of the state. We hoped that their common sense would triumph over prejudices and stupidity. We thought their boasted sense of justice would overcome the errors that so often fetter the human spirit; but we have always gone away empty handed. We shall beg no more.Collection: Men