Helen Keller Men Quotations

To keep on trying in spite of disappointment and failure is the only way to keep young and brave. Failures become victories if they make us wise-hearted.

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long in disappointment and bitterness at the closed door that we do not expectantly look for and therefore see with pleasure and gratitude the one which has been opened for us.

When we do the best we can, we never know what miracles await.

Rebuffed, but always persevering; self-reproached, but ever regaining faith; undaunted, tenacious, the heart of man labors toward immeasurably distant goals.

A child must feel the flush of victory and the heart-sinking of disappointment before he takes with a will to the tasks distasteful to him and resolves to dance his way through a dull routine of textbooks.

No loss by flood and lightning, no destruction of cities and temples by the hostile forces of nature, has deprived man of so many noble lives and impulses as those which his intolerance has destroyed.

Blindness separates people from things; deafness separates people from people.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next. Mere tolerance has given place to a sentiment of brotherhood between sincere men of all denominations.

God himself is not secure, having given man dominion over his work.

Self-culture has been loudly and boastfully proclaimed as sufficient for all our ideals of perfection. But if we listen to the best men and women everywhere ... they will say that 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.

For years to come the debris of a convulsed world will beset our steps. It will require a purpose stronger than any man and worthy of all men to calm and inspirit us. A sane society whose riches are happy children, men and women, beautiful with peace and creative activity, is not going to be ordained for us. We must make it ourselves.

I think the degree of a nation's civilisation may be measured by the degree of enlightenment of its women.

A man can't make a place for himself in the sun if he keeps taking refuge under the family tree.

Remember, no effort that we make to attain something beautiful is ever lost.

Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others.

Tolerance is the first principle of community; it is the spirit which conserves the best that all men think.

The inferiority of women is man-made.

The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

I do not mean to object to a thorough knowledge of the famous works we read. I object only to the interminable comments and bewildering criticisms that teach but one thing: there are as many opinions as there are men.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

It's wonderful to climb the liquid mountains of the sky. Behind me and before me is God and I have no fears.

Masculine exhalations are, as a rule, stronger, more vivid,more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness.

The few own the many because they possess the means of livelihood of all ... The country is governed for the richest, for the corporations, the bankers, the land speculators, and for the exploiters of labor. The majority of mankind are working people. So long as their fair demands - the ownership and control of their livelihoods - are set at naught, we can have neither men's rights nor women's rights. The majority of mankind is ground down by industrial oppression in order that the small remnant may live in ease.

What a blind person needs is not a teacher but another self.

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.

How spiritually blind are men that they fail to see that we are bound together. We rise or fall together; we are dwarfed or godlike, free or chained, together.

The highest result of education is tolerance. Long ago men fought and died for their faith; but it took ages to teach them the other kind of courage, - the courage to recognize the faiths of their brethren and their rights of conscience.

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.

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.

I grow more and more suspicious of the political powers that take men away from their work and set them shooting one another.

Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.

I have never believed that my limitations were in any sense punishments or accidents. If I had held such a view, I could never have expected the strength to overcome them.

The joy of surmounting obstacles that once seemed unremovable and pushing the frontier of accomplishment further-what other joy is there like it?

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 man.

If I regarded my life from the point of view of the pessimist, I should be undone. I should seek in vain for the light that does not visit my eyes and the music that does not ring in my ears. I should beg night and day and never be satisfied. I should sit apart in awful solitude, a prey to fear and despair. But since I consider it a duty to myself and to others to be happy, I escape a misery worse than any physical deprivation.

Reality even when it is sad is better than illusions. Illusions are at the mercy of any winds that blow. Real happiness must come from within, from a fixed purpose and faith in one's fellow men.

When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

It was my teacher's genius, her quick sympathy, her loving tact which made the first years of my education so beautiful. It was because she seized the right moment to impart knowledge that made it so pleasant and acceptable to me.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.

What can rulers, nobility and all the lords of the earth say to justify the horrible killing and maiming of twenty or thirty million valuable men who a short while ago ploughed, dug, wove, built, guided the traffic of the world, took their pleasure, loved their fellows, cherished their families, and feared naught?

What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.

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.

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.

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.

So long as I confine my activities to social services and the blind, the newspapers compliment me extravagantly, calling me an 'arch-priest of the sightless' and 'wonder woman'. But when I discuss poverty and the industrial system under which we live that is a different matter.

It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while.

I can say with conviction that the struggle which evil necessitates is one of the greatest blessings. It makes us strong, patient, helpful men and women. It lets us into the soul of things and teaches us that although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcomings 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.