To Live,
To Think, To Hope
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Inspirational Quotes of
Helen Keller
By Matthew Gordon
Copyright 2011 Matthew B. Gordon
Smashwords Edition
All Rights Reserved
Introductions & Editing copyright © Matthew Gordon
Cover design by Matthew Gordon
~ Helen Adams Keller ~
(1880 – 1968)
“Wherever a courageous soul rises, man is invincible.”
A Note on Structure
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This book compiles many portions of Helen Keller’s writings, speeches, & sayings. For better thematic structure, these quotes have been grouped into sections, such as religion, friends, life, and death. Each section retaining the same overall theme is then further divided and ordered by the source of each quote, i.e. Helen’s books. Each section also begins with a short introduction regarding that topic.
INTRODUCTION
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A deaf-blind individual from near birth, Helen Keller learned to read, write, and even speak. Renowned by nearly everyone during her time, Helen Keller’s life story shocked those who previously viewed the disabled as dependant and inadequate. With her disability forcing Helen to view everyone as equal, regardless of class or creed, Helen became a torchbearer for women’s, workers’, and disabled persons’ rights, as well as an advocate for social change.
Spanning Helen’s entire life, this book contains nearly seven-hundred quotes expressed by Helen dealing with her convictions on faith, society, America, the disabled, and more. Yet, more than a quote book, this collection also presents Helen’s life through chapter introductions, providing an overall look at this truly extraordinary person.
From these amazing quotes, one can understand life through the mind of a person initially viewed as a monster, but who triumphed and changed this perception, graduating from college, meeting twelve presidents, wining an Oscar, and writing thirteen books in the process. Without a doubt, Helen Keller earned her place in history, and in the hearts of the world.
1.
A Soul Awakened
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Quotes on the Birth of Helen Keller’s Spirt
On June 27th, 1880, the young southern belle Kate Keller gave birth to a stary-eyed child named Helen Adams Keller. Kate’s husband, Captain Arthur Henley Keller, a staunch man, worked for the local newspaper. Little Helen was Kate Keller’s angel on earth, born healthy with lush curls of gold and deep, picturesque blue eyes.
While famous for being the world’s most recognizable deaf-blind individual, Helen’s early years were anything but dark and quiet. From birth, Helen possessed extraordinary eyesight, finding lost needles on the floor that others could not find. As she grew older, Helen even began uttering words like “wah-wah” for water, and yelling for “tea, tea, tea.” When Helen was nineteen months old, however, her life inextricably changed forever.
In 1882, Helen came down with what doctors then called “brain fever,” but which was possibly scarlet fever or meningitis. This illness affected Helen’s brain and chest, causing intense fevers. At such a young age, Helen remarkably pulled through, but she was not untouched; pain began to afflict Helen’s eyes.
Noticing that Helen had been rubbing her eyes, Kate placed her palm in front of Helen’s face. To Kate’s alarm, Helen did not blink, jerk, or make any noise. Medical tests brought dreadful news: Helen could see no objects or light, nor could she hear. Helen Keller had become blind and deaf, entering into a realm of twilight and shadow. While Helen was left physically blind and deaf for the rest of her life, she would not, however, be left in dark, cold silence forever.
Social perceptions at this time framed those hindered through disability as monsters and outcasts, with their disorders believed to be a result of their sin. With her violent tantrums and outbursts - the result of the young girl’s inability to fully grasp her world - this view was no different with Helen. Many disabled children were sent away, becoming dysfunctional wards of the state. To Kate, Helen was still the porcelain-faced, curly-haired angel of of her youth.
At the pinnacle of Helen’s disfunction, Kate Keller remembered reading of Charles Dickens’ travels to America, in which the author had visited Laura Bridgman, a deaf-blind girl who had become well educated. Kate wondered if Helen could perhaps follow in Laura’s path. After searching tirelessly for medical remedies, Captain and Kate Keller became aquainted with Alexander Graham Bell, a deaf specialist (and future inventor of the telephone). Bell believed that the Perkins Institute for the Blind - the same institution that had proved miraculous for Laura Bridgman – would be ideal for Helen. It was through this school that the Kellers hired a young girl, herself nearly blind, to assist and educate the six year-old Helen Keller. This young teacher’s name was Anne Sullivan.
In March 1887, Anne Sullivan arrived in Tuscumbia, Alabama, hoping to open Helen’s eyes to the world around her. This proved more complicated than Anne had initially hoped. Attempting to teach Helen that every object had a corresponding word, Anne placed Helen’s favorite doll in her arms, spelling out the word “d-o-l-l” with Helen’s fingers. Helen however, still could not grasp this idea. While Helen became increasingly discouraged, Anne was unremitting in teaching Helen.
One early April morning, Anne traveled with Helen to the family’s water pump. “We walked down the path to the well-house,” Helen later wrote, “attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered.” Anne then placed Helen’s hand under the cool, flowing water of the pump. “As the stream gushed over one hand Anne spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly, I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten - a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free!”
The glassy liquid paired with the concept of language awoke in Helen something beyond description. Important because it permitted Helen to grasp and reach the outside world, the day in which Helen placed her fingers under the chilly water was also the beginning in which others could now experience the astonishing mind of a child previously labeled a monster, and who would go on to encourage millions and transform the world forever. Anne taught Helen thirty more words that very day - a day Helen always viewed as her “soul’s birthday.”
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From The Story of My Life (1903)
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.
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Many incidents of those early years are fixed in my memory, isolated, but clear and distinct, making the sense of the silent, aimless, dayless life all the more intense.
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I think only those who have escaped that death-in-life existence, from which Laura Bridgman was rescued, can realize how isolated, how shrouded in darkness, how cramped by its own impotence is a soul without thought or faith or hope. Words are powerless to describe the desolation of that prison-house, or the joy of the soul that is delivered out of its captivity.
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In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness.
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I knew my own mind well enough and always had my own way, even if I had to fight tooth and nail for it.
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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 contract between the two lives which it connects. It was the third of March, 1887, three months before I was seven years old.
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I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.
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I did nothing but explore with my hands and learn the name of every object that I touched; and the more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world.
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At the beginning I was only a little mass of possibilities. It was teacher who unfolded and developed them. When she came, everything about me breathed of love and joy and was full of meaning.
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The barren places between my mind and the minds of others blossomed like the rose.
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I shall never forget the surprise and delight I felt when I uttered by first connected sentence, “It is warm.” True, they were broken and stammering syllables; but they were human speech. My soul, conscious of new strength, came out of bondage, and was reaching through those broken symbols of speech to all knowledge and all faith.
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The treasures of a new, beautiful world were laid at my feet, and I took in pleasure and information at every turn. I lived myself into all things. I was never still a moment; my life was full of motion as those insects that crowd a whole existence into one brief day.
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Miss Sullivan touched my forehead and spelled with decided emphasis, “Think.” In a flash I knew that the word was the name of the process that was going on in my head. This was my first conscious perception of an abstract idea.
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(after her experience at the well, remembering a doll she had broken) - On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.
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I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were; but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them—words that were to make the world blossom for me.
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It would have been difficult to find a happier child than I was as I lay in my crib at the close of that eventful day and lived over the joys it had brought me, and for the first time longed for a new day to come.
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Before me I saw a new world opening in beauty and light, and I felt within me the capacity to know all things.
From My Key of Life: Optimism (1903)
With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.
From The World I Live In (1908)
Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire.
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With the dropping of a little word from another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers, began the intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life.
From Out of the Dark (1913)
When I learned the meaning of “I” and “me” and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me. Thus it was not the sense of touch that brought me knowledge. It was the awakening of my soul that first rendered my senses their value, their cognizance of objects, names, qualities, and properties.
2.
Reaching for Truth
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Quotes on Knowledge & Thought
From the excitement gained at the water pump, Helen continued her education at various schools for blind and deaf children, where she learned arithmetic, French, and Latin. In 1896, Helen enrolled at The Cambridge School for Young Ladies, a private high school. It was here that Helen was first exposed to an educational system not built to specifically serve the disabled. The hardships caused by this fact, however, did not slow Helen whatsoever.
At school, Anne accompanied Helen to every lecture and every class, translating lessons for Helen in the palm of her hand. When outside the classroom, Anne worked determinedly to translate all of Helen’s books into Braille, helping Helen to continue her studies. Of this Helen wrote, “I could not take notes in class or write exercises; but I wrote all my compositions and translations at home on my typewriter.” From her astonishing spirit and personality, many of Helen’s classmates sought to learn sign language in order to converse with Helen.
As a small child, Helen once proclaimed, “someday I shall go to college – but I shall go to Harvard.” Harvard was an all male college at the time; yet Helen did not allow her dream to die.
In 1900, Helen’s dream became reality when she enrolled at Radcliffe College, the female coordinate college of Harvard. During her preliminary examinations, Helen passed all of her tests, even receiving honors in German and English. Surprised by Helen’s quick ability to learn and excel in every subject, Many administrators surmised that Anne was to account for this success. As a result, Anne could not help Helen translate her tests and examinations, none of which were printed in Braille.
Even though Anne was replaced by a new translator, Helen continued to excel, exhibiting her intellect and proving that she relied on no one. Helen recalled, “The administrative board of Radcliffe did not realize how difficult they were making my examinations, nor did they understand the peculiar difficulties I had to surmount. But if they unintentionally placed obstacles in my way, I have the consolation of knowing that I overcame them all.”
Helen graduated from Radcliffe cum laude four years later, with a Bachelor of Arts Degree, becoming the first blind-deaf individual to earn such a distinction. During her junior year, Helen wrote her autobiography The Story of My Life, the first of thirteen books. Throughout her life, Helen respected her education, as it gave her the chance to better express her unique situation and philosophy to others. Above all else, Helen understood that “the highest result of education is tolerance.”
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From The Story of My Life (1903)
She (Anne Sullivan) realized that a child’s mind is like a shallow brook which ripples and dances merrily over the stony course of its education and reflects here a flower, there a bush, yonder a fleecy cloud; and she attempted to guide my mind on its way, knowing that like a brook it should be fed by mountain streams and hidden springs, until it broadened out into a deep river, capable of reflecting in its placid surface, billowy hills, the luminous shadows of trees and the blue heavens, as well as the sweet face of a little flower.
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It was my teacher’s genius, her quick sympathy, her loving tact which made the first years of education so beautiful.
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I now had the key to all language, and I was eager to learn to use it.
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Any teacher can take a child to the classroom, but not every teacher can make him learn.
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Thus I came up out of Egypt and stood before Sinai, and a power divide 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.”
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"Knowledge is power." Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge—broad, deep knowledge—is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low.
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Have you ever been at sea in a dense fog, when it seemed as if a tangible white darkness shut you in, and the great ship, tense and anxious, groped her way toward the shore with plummet and sounding-line, and you waited with beating heart for something to happen? I was like that ship before my education began, only I was without compass or sounding-line, and had no way of knowing how near the harbour was. “Light! Give me light!” was the wordless cry of my soul, and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.
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Many of the joys and sorrows of childhood have lost their poignancy; and many incidents of vital importance in my early education have been forgotten in the excitement of great discoveries.
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What many children think of with dread, as a painful plodding through grammar, hard sums of harder definitions, is to-day one of my most precious memories.
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Just as the wonder-working mantle of the Nautilus changes the material it absorbs from the water and makes it a part of itself, so the bits of knowledge one gathers undergo a similar change and become pearls of thought.
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The thought of going to college took root in my heart and became an earnest desire, which impelled me to competition for a degree with seeing and hearing girls, in the face of the strong opposition of many true and wise friends.
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Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than our understanding.
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There are, however, times when I long to sweep away half the things I am expected to learn; for the overtaxed mind cannot enjoy the treasure it has secured at the greatest cost.
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Great poetry, whether written in Greek or English, needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart. Would that the host of those who make the great works of the poets odious by their analysis, impositions and laborious comments might learn this simple truth!
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Gradually from naming an object we dance step by step until we have traversed the vast distance between our first stammered syllable and the sweep of thought in a line of Shakespeare.
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In a word, 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.
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There is nothing more beautiful, I think, that the evanescent fleeting images and sentiments presented by a language one is just becoming familiar with - ideas that flit across the mental sky, shaped and tinted by capricious fancy.
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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. Likewise, my compositions are made up of crude notions of my own, inlaid with the brighter thoughts and riper opinions of the authors I have read. It seems to me that the great difficulty of writing is to make the language of the educated mind express our confused ideas, half feelings, half thoughts, when we are little more than bundles of instinctive tendencies.
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Every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill of Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.
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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. But during the first nineteen months of my life I had caught glimpses of broad, green fields, a luminous sky, trees and flowers which the darkness that followed could not wholly blot out. If we have once seen, "the day is ours, and what the day has shown."
I remember my first day at Radcliffe. It was a day full of interest for me. I had looked forward to it for years. A potent force within me, stronger than the persuasion of my friends, stronger even than the pleadings of my heart, had impelled me to try my strength by the standards of those who see and hear. I knew that there were obstacles in the way; but I was eager to overcome them. I had taken to heart the words of the wise Roman who said, "To be banished from Rome is but to live outside of Rome."
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In the wonderland of Mind I should be as free as another. Its people, scenery, manners, joys, tragedies should be living, tangible interpreters of the real world.
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One goes to college to learn, it seems, not to think. When one enters the portals of learning, one leaves the dearest pleasures—solitude, books and imagination
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The lecture-halls seemed filled with the spirit of the great and the wise, and I thought the professors were the embodiment of wisdom. If I have since learned differently, I am not going to tell anybody.
From My Key of Life: Optimism (1903)
What do I consider a teacher should be? One who breathes life into knowledge so that it takes new form in progress in civilization.
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Once I fretted and beat myself against the wall that shut me in. Now I rejoice in the consciousness that I can think, act and attain heaven.
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Science converts the dreams of the poet, the theory of the mathematician and the fiction of the economist into ships, hospitals and instruments that enable one skilled hand to perform the work of a thousand.
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To the children of the poorest laborer the school-door stands open. From the civilized nations universal education is driving out the dull host of illiteracy.
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Ideas are mightier than fire and sword. Noiselessly they propagate themselves from land to land.
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The most beautiful world is always entered through imagination.
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Keep your mind hospitable to new ideas and new views of truth.
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Who can doubt the vastness of the achievements of education when one considers how different the condition of the blind and the deaf is from what it was a century ago?
From The World I Live In (1908)
So imagination crowns the experience of my hands. And they learned their cunning from the wise hand of another, which, itself guided by imagination, led me safely in paths that I knew not, made darkness light before me, and made crooked ways straight.
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Education broadens to include all men, and deepens to reach all truths.
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I only know that after my education began the world which came within my reach was all alive. I spelled to my blocks and to my dogs.
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In either sphere self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness.
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The bulk of the world’s knowledge is an imaginary construction.
From Out of the Dark (1913)
The ideal of college education is not to give miscellaneous instruction, but to disclose to the student his highest capacities and teach him how to turn them to achievement. By this ideal those who labour in darkness are brought to see a great light, and those who dwell in silence shall give service in obedience to the voice of love.
3.
A World Seen
with Fingers
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Quotes on Perception & Sense
In having lost both sight and hearing, Helen relied heavily on her remaining senses. One day, however, Helen felt helpless as she inextricably and unexpectedly lost her sense of smell and taste. Helen did not have the foreknowledge that this loss would only last a few days, and it had a profound affect on the young woman. While trivial to people who can see and hear, to Helen, taste and smell were half of her world. Helen wrote of this experience, “The loss of smell for a few days gave me a clearer idea than I had ever had what it is to be blinded suddenly, helplessly.”
In losing her sight and hearing before the time she could remember, Helen had not a notion of what the sudden loss of sense did to the soul. “I knew then what it must be when the great curtain shuts out suddenly the light of day, the stars, and the firmament itself,” wrote Helen.