Source: The Story of My Life: With Her Letters (1887 1901) and a Supplementary Account of Her Education Including Passages from the Reports and Letters of Her Teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan by John Albert Macy

“To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.”

Helen Keller

“I believe in the immortality of the soul because I have within me immortal longings.”

Helen Keller

Source: To Love This Life: Quotations By Helen Keller

“No matter how dull, or how mean, or how wise a man is, he feels that happiness is his indisputable right.”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)

“If it is true that the violin is the most perfect of musical instruments, then Greek is the violin of human thought.”

Helen Keller book The Story of My Life

Part II: Letters (1887 - 1901) TO MRS. LAURENCE HUTTON Wrentham, February 20, 1898.
The Story of My Life (1903)

“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”

Helen Keller

Let Us Have Faith (1940)

“To what is good I open the doors of my being, and jealously shut them against what is bad. Such is the force of this beautiful and wilful conviction, it carries itself in the face of all opposition. I am never discouraged by absence of good. I never can be argued into hopelessness.”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)

“I want to say to those who are trying to learn to speak and those who are teaching them: Be of good cheer. Do not think of to-day's failures, but of the success that may come to-morrow. 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. Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost. Sometime, somewhere, somehow we shall find that which we seek. We shall speak, yes, and sing, too, as God intended we should speak and sing.”

Helen Keller

Address to the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf (8 July 1896)

“[…] 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 coöperate with the good, that it may prevail. I try to increase the power God has given me to see the best in everything and every one, and make that Best a part of my life.”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)

“Most people measure their happiness in terms of physical pleasure and material possession. Could they win some visible goal which they have set on the horizon, how happy they would be! Lacking this gift or that circumstance, they would be miserable. If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep. If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life, — if, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.”

Helen Keller book Optimism

Optimism (1903)