God Himself is not secure having given man dominion over His works.

— Helen Keller

Great poetry needs no interpreter other than a responsive heart.

— Helen Keller

Happiness does not come from without, it comes from within

— Helen Keller

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 no way of knowing how near the harbor was. "Light! Give me light!" was the wordless cry of my soul and the light of love shone on me in that very hour.

— Helen Keller

Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, ‘inhale great drafts of space,’ wonder, wonder at the wind’s unwearied activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul from the actual sonorities of a thousand branches and tumbling waters. How can the world be shriveled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch, is faithful to its service? I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose between the sense of sight and that of touch, I would not part with the warm, endearing contact of human hands…

— Helen Keller

I also dislike people who try to talk down to my understanding. They are like people who when walking with you try to shorten their steps to suit yours, hypocrisy in both cases is equally exasperating.

— Helen Keller

I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten-my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!

— Helen Keller

I am no worshiper of cloth of any color, but I love the red flag and what it symbolizes to me and other Socialists. I have a red flag hanging in my study, and if I could, I should gladly march with it past the office of the Times and let all the reporters and photographers make the most of the spectacle.

— Helen Keller

I am only one but still I am one. I cannot do everything but still I can do something. And because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

— Helen Keller

I began my studies with eagerness. Before me, I saw a new world opening in beauty and light, and I felt within me the capacity to know all things. In the wonderland of Mind I should be as free as another [with sight and hearing]. Its people, scenery, manners, joys, and tragedies should be living tangible interpreters of the real world. The lecture halls seemed filled with the spirit of the great and wise, and I thought the professors were the embodiment of wisdom... But I soon discovered that college was not quite the romantic lyceum I had imagined. Many of the dreams that had delighted my young inexperience became beautifully less and "faded into the light of common day." Gradually I began to find that there were disadvantages in going to college. The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent. But in college there is no time to commune with one's thoughts. 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 – outside with the whispering pines. I suppose I ought to find some comfort in the thought that I am laying up treasures for future enjoyment, but I am improvident enough to prefer present joy to hoarding riches against a rainy day.

— Helen Keller