Helen Keller
One painful duty fulfilled makes the next plainer and easier.Collection: Next
Your success and happiness lie in you. External conditions are the accidents of life, its outer trappings.Collection: Success
I thank God for my handicaps. For through them, I have found myself, my work and my God.Collection: Gratitude
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.Collection: Bad Ass
The things you do today that you don't have to do will determine who, what, and where you will be when it is too late to do anything about the things you should have done.Collection: Should Have
When we complain of having to do the same thing over and over, let us remember that God does not send new trees, strange flowers and different grasses every year. When the spring winds blow, they blow in the same way. In the same places the same dear blossoms lift up the same sweet faces, yet they never weary us. When it rains, it rains as it always has. Even so would the same tasks which fill our daily lives put on new meanings if we wrought them in the spirit of renewal from within--a spirit of growth and beauty.Collection: Sweet
A well-educated mind will always have more questions than answers.Collection: Educational
Happiness is a state of mind, and depends very little on outward circumstances.Collection: Happiness
The best preparedness is the one that disarms the hostility of other nations and makes friends of them.Collection: Friendship
We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means we choose between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. We elect expensive masters to do our work for us, and then blame them because they work for themselves and for their class.Collection: Mean
The simplest way to be happy is to do good.Collection: You Make Me Happy
The best things in life are unseen, thats why we close our eyes when we kiss, cry, and dreamCollection: Meaningful
Life is short and unpredictable. Eat the dessert first!Collection: Inspirational Life
When indeed shall we learn that we are all related one to the other, that we are all members of one body? Until the spirit of love for our fellow people, regardless of race, color, or creed, shall fill the world, making real in our lives and our deeds the actuality of human brother- and sisterhood, until the great mass of the people shall be filled with the sense of responsibility for each other's welfare, social justice can never be attained.Collection: Brother
There is no better way to thank God for your sight than by giving a helping hand to someone in the dark.Collection: Eye
For three things I thank God every day of my life: thanks that he has vouchsafed me knowledge of his works; deep thanks that he has set in my darkness the lamp of faith; deep, deepest thanks that I have another life to look forward to--a life joyous with light and flowers and heavenly song.Collection: Thanksgiving
It is not possible to refer a complex difficulty to a single cause.Collection: Causes
Touch each object as if tomorrow you would never be able to feel anything again.Collection: Able
What is worse than having no sight is being able to see but having no vision.Collection: Inspiring
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. 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.Collection: Friendship
I believe humility is a virtue, but I prefer not to use it unless it is absolutely necessary.Collection: Believe
Our beloved ones have not 'gone to a far country.' It is only the veil of sense that separates them from us, and even that veil grows thin when our thoughts reach out to them.Collection: Country
Relationships are like Rome -- difficult to start out, incredible during the prosperity of the 'golden age', and unbearable during the fall. Then, a new kingdom will come along and the whole process will repeat itself until you come across a kingdom like Egypt... that thrives, and continues to flourish. This kingdom will become your best friend, your soul mate, and your love.Collection: Relationship
A simple, childlike faith in a Divine Friend solves all the problems that come to us by land or seaCollection: Children
I have visited sweatshops, factories, and crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it. The foundation of society is laid upon a basis of . . . individualism, conquest and exploitation . . . A social order such as this, built upon such wrong and basic principles, is bound to retard the development of all. The output of a cotton mill or a coal mine is considered of greater importance than the production of healthy, happy-hearted and free human beings. We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name.Collection: Educational
I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days during their early adult life. Darkness would make them more appreciative of sight; silence would teach them the joys of sound.Collection: Fear
The saddest thing in life is people with sight, but without vision.Collection: Sight
...our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding.Collection: Understanding
health in all lands is among the indispensable guarantees of human progress.Collection: Health
What a strange life I lead- a kind of Cinderella-life-half glitter in crystal shoes, half mice and cinders! But it is a wonderful life all the same.Collection: Shoes
There's only one story, the story of your life.Collection: Stories
This great republic is a mockery of freedom as long as you are doomed to dig and sweat to earn a miserable living while the masters enjoy the fruit of your toil.Collection: Sweat
I grow more and more suspicious of the political powers that take men away from their work and set them shooting one another.Collection: Men
So long as I confine my activities to social service and the blind, they compliment me extravagantly, calling me 'arch priestess of the sightless,' 'wonder woman,' and a 'modern miracle.' But when it comes to a discussion of poverty, and I maintain that it is the result of wrong economics-that the industrial system under which we live is at the root of much of the physical deafness and blindness in the world-that is a different matter!Collection: Roots
The human being is born with an incurable capacity for making the best of things.Collection: Born
The attempt to suppress an idea has always and everywhere proved a failure.Collection: Ideas
True friends never apart maybe in distance but never in heartCollection: Best Friend
The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel.Collection: Vision
We bereaved are not alone. We belong to the largest company in all the world--the company of those who have known suffering.Collection: Grief
I, for one, love strength, daring, fortitude. I do not want people to kill the fight in them; I want them to fight for right things.Collection: Fighting
I am not a perfect being. . . . I have more faults than I know what to do with. I have a naughty temper. I am stubborn, impatient of hindrances and of stupidity. I have not in the truest sense a Christian spirit. I am naturally a fighter. I am lazy. I put off till tomorrow what I might better do today. I do not feel that I have been compensated for the two senses I lack. I have worked hard for all the senses I have got, and always I beg for more.Collection: Christian
I cannot but say a word and look my disapproval when I hear that my country is spending millions for war and war engines-more, I have heard, than twice as much as the entire public school system costs the nation.Collection: Country
I do not like the world as it is; so I am trying to make it a little more as I want it.Collection: Trying
The inferiority of women is man-made.Collection: Men
It is curious to observe what different ideals of happiness people cherish, and in what singular places they look for this well-spring of their life. Many look for it in the hoarding of riches, some in the pride of power, and others in the achievements of art and literature; a few seek it in the exploration of their own minds, or in search for knowledge.Collection: Art
Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Years
The most important day I remember in all my life is the one on which my teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, came to me. I am filled with wonder when I consider the immeasurable contrasts between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old.Collection: Teacher