Helen Keller Quotes

“It seems strange to many people that I should be impressed by the wonders and beauties of Niagara. They are always asking: ‘what does this beauty or that music mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?’ In the most evident sense they mean everything.”

“There are days when the close attention I must give to details chafes my spirit, and the thought that I must spend hours reading a few chapters, while in the world without other girls are laughing and singing and dancing, makes me rebellious; but soon I recover my buoyancy and laugh the discontent out of my heart.”

“I have, as it were, a superstitious hesitation in lifting the veil that clings about my childhood like a golden mist.”

“Some day you will write a great story out of your own head, that will be a comfort and help to many.”

“I had known for a long time that the people about me used a method of communication different from mine; and even before I knew that a deaf child could be taught to speak, I was conscious of dissatisfaction with the means of communication I already possessed.”

“I feel that her being is inseparable from my own, and that the footsteps of my life are in hers. All the best of me belongs to her—there is not a talent, or an inspiration or a joy in me that has not awakened by her loving touch.”

“It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and texture of my mind.”

“We keep on trying because we know that others have succeeded, and we are not willing to acknowledge defeat.”

“For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way.”

“Every struggle is a victory.”

“It is with a kind of fear that I begin to write the history of my life.”

“Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge—broad, deep knowledge—is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.”

“If they unintentionally placed obstacles in my way, I have the consolation of knowing that I overcame them all.”

“In a word, literature is my Utopia.”

“One thing is certain, the language was ineffaceably stamped upon my brain, though for a long time no one knew it, least of all myself.”

“One who is entirely dependent upon the manual alphabet has always a sense of restraint, of narrowness.”

“Everything I found in books that pleased me I retained in my memory, consciously or unconsciously, and adapted it.”

“My soul, conscious of new strength, came out of bondage, and was reaching through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and face.”

“Gradually I got used to the silence and darkness that surrounded me and forgot that it had ever been different, until she came—my teacher—who was to set my spirit free.”

“My work was practice, practice, practice.”