Helen Keller (1880-1968)

Helen Adams Keller was an American author, disability rights advocate, political activist and lecturer. Born in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, she lost her sight and her hearing after a bout of illness when she was 19 months old. She then communicated primarily using home signs until the age of seven, when she met her first teacher and life-long companion Anne Sullivan. Sullivan taught Keller language, including reading and writing. After an education at both specialist and mainstream schools, Keller attended Radcliffe College of Harvard University and became the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.

Quotes

I long to accomplish a great and noble task; but it is my chief duty and joy to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble.
Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn whatever state I am in, therin to be content.
I am only one, still I am one. I can not do everything, still I can do something. I will not refuse to do the something I can do
Never bend your head. Hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.
To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug.
I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Work
Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.

Suffering
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.

Apathy
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

Happiness
One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.
We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

Joy, Patience
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security 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 exposure.

Security
The highest result of education is tolerance.

Tolerance
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

Character, Suffering
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.
Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.... Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.

Security, Superstition
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.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.