Insightful Vision

The Miracle Worker

Observations about life from Helen Keller

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” 

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.”

“Instead of comparing our lot with that of those who are more fortunate than we are, we should compare it with the lot of the great majority of our fellow men. It then appears that we are among the privileged.”

“I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something.”

“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.”

“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land.”

“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.”

“There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.”

“As selfishness and complaint pervert and cloud the mind, so love clears and sharpens the vision.”

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

“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood.”

“The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but no vision.”

— Helen Keller, in Uncle John’s Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader, #15, p. 233.