Helen Keller (1880–1968) was an American author, political activist, a disability rights lawyer, and lecturer. In her biography, The Story of My Life, she shared everything about her and her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Her birthday on 27 June is commemorated as Helen Keller Day in Pennsylvania. In this post, I’ve gathered all Helen Keller quotes that will inspire you. For example, Helen Keller quotes on life, love, justice, education, and more.
Best Helen Keller Quotes of All Time with Images
1. “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” ~ Helen Keller
2. “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.” ~ Helen Keller
3. “Your success and happiness lie in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.” ~ Helen Keller
4. “You will succeed if you persevere; and you will find joy in overcoming obstacles.” ~ Helen Keller
5. “Better to be blind and see with your heart, than to have two good eyes and see nothing.” ~ Helen Keller
6. “The most beautiful world is always entered through imagination.” ~ Helen Keller
7. “No smile is as beautiful as the one that struggles through tears.” ~ Helen Keller
8. “The true test of a character is to face hard conditions with the determination to make them better.” ~ Helen Keller
9. “Be of good cheer. Do not think of today’s failures, but of the success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere, and you will find joy in overcoming obstacles… Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.” ~ Helen Keller
10. “The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.” ~ Helen Keller
Helen Keller Quotes About Vision
11. “The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight but no vision.”
12. “As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so sex with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.”
13. “The world is not moved only by the mighty shoves of the heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”
14. Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.
15. What is worse than having no sight is being able to see but having no vision.
16. There is no better way to thank God for your sight than by giving a helping hand to someone in the dark.
17. When you lose your vision, you lose contact with things. When you lose your hearing, you lose contact with people. – Helen Keller
18. Blindness is an unfortunate handicap but true vision does not require the eyes. – Helen Keller
19. “Knowledge is love and light and vision.” – Helen Keller
20. “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” – Helen Keller
Helen Keller Quotes on Love
21. “What we once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose, For all that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” – Helen Keller
22. “Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.”
23. “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.” ~ Helen Keller
24. “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” ~ Helen Keller
25. “It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.” ~ Helen Keller
26. “You cannot touch love but you can feel the sweetness it pours into everything.” – Helen Keller
27. “As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.” – Helen Keller
28. “Knowledge is love and light and vision.” – Helen Keller
29. “You don’t love someone for their looks, or their clothes, or for their fancy car, but because they sing a song only you can hear.” – Helen Keller
30. “What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us.” – Helen Keller
Helen Keller Quotes about Death
31. “Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.” ~ Helen Keller
32. I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
33. I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
34. I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings. – Helen Keller
35. What we have once enjoyed we can never lose. All that we love deeply becomes a part of us. – Helen Keller
Funny Helen Keller Quotes
36. “I rejoice to live in such a splendidly disturbing time!”
37. “When one reads hurriedly and nervously, having in mind written tests and examinations, one’s brain becomes encumbered with a lot of bric-a-brac for which there seems to be little use.”
38. What happened when Helen Keller tried to rob a bank?
She tied up the safe and blew up the guards.
39. “No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.” – Helen Keller
40. “I am thankful that in a troubled world no calamity can prevent the return of spring.” – Helen Keller
Helen Keller Quotes on Friends and Friendship
41. “The heart of a friend gives out sufficient light for us in the dark to rise by.” ~ Helen Keller
42. “My friends have made the story of my life.”
43. “Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.” ~ Helen Keller
44. “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.” ~ Helen Keller
45. “The best and most beautiful thing in life is friendship that springs out of the heart, as fragrances out of the flower.” – Helen Keller
46. So long as the memory of certain beloved friends lives in my heart, I shall say that life is good. – Helen Keller
47. My friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges. – Helen Keller
48. The best preparedness is the one that disarms the hostility of other nations and makes friends of them.
49. What we have once enjoyed we can never lose.
All that we love deeply becomes a part of us. – Helen Keller
50. The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others
will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves. – Helen Keller
“I am only one” Quotes by Helen Keller
51. I am only one, but I am still one. I cannot do everything, but still, I can do something. I will not refuse to do something I can do.
52. “What I’m looking for is not out there, it is in me.”
53. “There will never be another now –
I’ll make the most of today.
There will never be another me –
I’ll make the most of myself.” ~ Helen Keller
Helen Keller Quotes on Optimism
54. “Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.” ~ Helen Keller
55. “While they were saying it couldn’t be done, it was done.”
56. “Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.” – Helen Keller
57. Everything has its wonders, even darkness, and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content. – Helen Keller
58. “I can not do everything, but I can do something. I must not fail to do the something that I can do.” ~ Helen Keller
59. “Each day comes to me with both hands full of possibilities.” ~ Helen Keller
60. “Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it. My optimism, then, does not rest on the absence of evil, but on a glad belief in the preponderance of good and a willing effort always to cooperate with the good, that it may prevail.” ~ Helen Keller
61. “Deep, solemn optimism, it seems to me, should spring from this firm belief in the presence of God in the individual; not a remote, unapproachable governor of the universe, but a God who is very near every one of us, who is present not only in earth, sea, and sky but also in every pure and noble impulse of our hearts.” ~ Helen Keller
Helen Keller Quotes about Education
62. “Education should train the child to use his brains, to make for himself a place in the world and maintain his rights even when it seems that society would shove him into the scrap-heap.”
63. “The highest result of education is tolerance.”
64. “What do I consider a teacher should be? One who breathes life into knowledge so that it takes new form in progress and civilization.”
65. “True teaching cannot be learned from textbooks any more than a surgeon can acquire his skill by reading about surgery.”
66. “What do I consider a teacher should be? One who breathes life into knowledge so that it takes new form in progress and civilization.”
67. “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.”
Helen Keller Adventure Quotes
68. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
Security is mostly a superstition.
It does not exist in nature. -Helen Keller
69. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. – Helen Keller
70. Life is either a great adventure or nothing. – Helen Keller
Helen Keller quotes on Life
71. “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”
72. “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.” – Helen Keller
73. “The unselfish effort to bring cheer to others will be the beginning of a happier life for ourselves.”
74. “We are never really happy until we try to brighten the lives of others.”
75. “A happy life consists not in the absence but in the mastery of hardships.” – Helen Keller
76. “The place between your comfort zone and your dream is where life takes place.” ~ Helen Keller
77. “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.”
78. “We could never learn to be brave and patient if there were only joy in the world.”
79. “The true test of a character is to face hard conditions with the determination to make them better.”
80. “If we do not like our work, and do not try to get happiness out of it, we are a menace to our profession as well as to ourselves.”
81. “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.”
82. “It has been said that life has treated me harshly; and sometimes I have complained in my heart because many pleasures of human experience have been withheld from me… if much has been denied me, much, very much, has been given me…”
83. “The struggle of life is one of our greatest blessings. It makes us patient, sensitive, and Godlike. It teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” ~ Helen Keller
84. “It is wonderful how much time good people spend fighting the devil. If they would only expend the same amount of energy loving their fellow men, the devil would die in his own tracks of ennui.”
85. “When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.”
Best Quotes of Helen Keller on Justice
86. “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.”
87. “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.”
88. Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings. – Helen Keller
89. There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his. – Helen Keller
90. I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.
91. 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.
Helen Keller Quotes about Deafness
92. “If I, deaf, blind, find life rich and interesting, how much more can you gain by the use of your five senses!” ~ Helen Keller
93. “I am just as deaf as I am blind. The problems of deafness are deeper and more complex, if not more important than those of blindness. Deafness is a much worse misfortune. For it means the loss of the most vital stimulus- the sound of the voice that brings language sets thoughts astir and keeps us in the intellectual company of a man.” ~ Helen Keller
94. “It is not blindness or deafness that bring me my darkest hours. It is the acute disappointment in not being able to speak normally. Longingly I feel how much more good I might have done if I had only acquired natural speech. But out of this sorrowful experience, I understand more fully all human striving, vaunted ambitions, and the infinite capacity of hope.”