The Story of My Life

by Helen Keller

there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.

If we have once seen, “the day is ours, and what the day has shown.”

Thus I came up out of Egypt and stood before Sinai, and a power divine 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.”

“You cannot touch the clouds, you know; but you feel the rain and know how glad the flowers and the thirsty earth are to have it after a hot day. You cannot touch love either; but you feel the sweetness that it pours into everything. Without love you would not be happy or want to play.”

a look is often the very soul of what one says.

There was always one bud larger and more beautiful than the rest, which pushed her outer, covering back with more pomp, as if the beauty in soft, silky robes knew that she was the lily-queen by right divine, while her more timid sisters doffed their green hoods shyly, until the whole plant was one nodding bough of loveliness and fragrance.

Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.

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.

we should take our education as we would take a walk in the country, leisurely, our minds hospitably open to impressions of every sort.

“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. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man’s progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.

Great poetry, whether written in Greek or in English, needs no other interpreter than a responsive heart.

How easy it is to fly on paper wings!

“there is nothing more capricious than the memory of a child: what it will hold, and what it will lose.”

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, “There is joy in self-forgetfulness.” So I try to make the light in others’ eyes my sun, the music in others’ ears my symphony, the smile on others’ lips my happiness.

Thus it is that my friends have made the story of my life. In a thousand ways they have turned my limitations into beautiful privileges, and enabled me to walk serene and happy in the shadow cast by my deprivation.

I am thinking about a dear little girl, who wept very hard. She wept because her brother teased her very much. I will tell you what he did, and I think you will feel very sorry for the little child. She had a most beautiful doll given her. Oh, it was a lovely and delicate doll! but the little girl’s brother, a tall lad, had taken the doll, and set it up in a high tree in the garden, and had run away. The little girl could not reach the doll, and could not help it down, and therefore she cried. The doll cried, too, and stretched out its arms from among the green branches, and looked distressed. Soon the dismal night would come—and was the doll to sit up in the tree all night, and by herself? The little girl could not endure that thought. “I will stay with you,” said she to the doll, although she was not at all courageous. Already she began to see quite plainly the little elves in their tall pointed hats, dancing down the dusky alleys, and peeping from between the bushes, and they seemed to come nearer and nearer; and she stretched her hands up towards the tree in which the doll sat and they laughed, and pointed their fingers at her. How terrified was the little girl; but if one has not done anything wrong, these strange little elves cannot harm one. “Have I done anything wrong? Ah, yes!” said the little girl. “I have laughed at the poor duck, with the red rag tied round its leg. It hobbled, and that made me laugh; but it is wrong to laugh at the poor animals!”

I cannot see the lovely things with my eyes, but my mind can see them all, and so I am joyful all the day long.

I know that we could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

Whatever has not the power of loving must have a very dreary life indeed.

God who is the greatest and happiest of all beings is the most loving too. All the love that is in our hearts comes from him, as all the light which is in the flowers comes from the sun. And the more we love the more near we are to God and His Love.

A great deal of the trouble that is in the world is medicine which is very bad to take, but which it is good to take because it makes us better.

I am glad to have my share in life, whether it be bright or sad.

.I realize now what a selfish, greedy girl I was to ask that my cup of happiness should be filled to overflowing, without stopping to think how many other people’s cups were quite empty.

I am so thankful that I can rejoice in the beauties, which my friends gather and put into my hands!

Her imagination is so vital that she falls completely under the illusion of a story, and lives in its world.

“Toleration,” she said once, when she was visiting her friend Mrs. Laurence Hutton, “is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.”

I have thought about it a great deal, and the more I think, the more certain I am that obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child.

Thus it is, we study, plan and prepare ourselves for a task, and when the hour for action arrives, we find that the system we have followed with such labour and pride does not fit the occasion; and then there’s nothing for us to do but rely on something within us, some innate capacity for knowing and doing, which we did not know we possessed until the hour of our great need brought it to light.

The little house is a genuine bit of paradise. It consists of one large square room with a great fireplace, a spacious bay-window, and a small room where our servant, a little negro boy, sleeps. There is a piazza in front, covered with vines that grow so luxuriantly that you have to part them to see the garden beyond.

It’s queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty!

It is a great thing to feel that you are of some use in the world, that you are necessary to somebody.

‘Truth crushed to earth shall rise again; The eternal years of God are hers; But Error, wounded, writhes with pain, And dies among his worshipers.’”

“I think it is right for men to fight against wrongs and tyrants.”

the question is the door to the child’s mind.

One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.

You have set yourselves a difficult task, but you will succeed if you persevere, and you will find a joy in overcoming obstacles—a delight in climbing rugged paths, which you would perhaps never know if you did not sometime slip backward—if the road was always smooth and pleasant.

Language was her liberator, and from the first she cherished it.

Tell her there are a few bitter drops in every one’s cup, and the only way is to take the bitter patiently, and the sweet thankfully.