"It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision," and other Helen Keller quotes

Helen Keller (1880-1968) became blind and deaf, most likely due to scarlet fever, when she was just seven months old.  Through valiant efforts of her family and a blind teacher, Anne Sullivan, young Helen was able to begin communicating with the world around her.  Breakthroughs and techniques were developed through their relationship that are still used to this day.

In 1904 Helen graduated from Radcliff College magna cum laude, and was the first deaf and blind person ever to graduate from a university anywhere in the world.

She went on to become a famous author and advocate for those with disabilities, as well as fighting for women’s rights, being an active pacifist, and a supporter of birth control. She ended up visiting many international leaders in thirty-nine different countries, and was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.

These are some of my favorite quotes from her.  Let me know which ones speak to you…. 

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.

As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.

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

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.

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.

The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of tiny pushes of each honest worker.

Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction! Be heroes in an army of construction!

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

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

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

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

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.

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

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.

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.

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

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow.

Life is either a great adventure or nothing.

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.

Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same.

It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision.

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.

No pessimist ever discovered the secret of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

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.

It gives me a deep comforting sense that "things seen are temporal and things unseen are eternal."

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched - they must be felt with the heart.

I do not want the peace which passeth understanding, I want the understanding which bringeth peace.

The highest result of education is 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.

The marvelous richness of human experience would lose something of rewarding joy if there were no limitations to overcome. The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.

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

Unless we form the habit of going to the Bible in bright moments as well as in trouble, we cannot fully respond to its consolations because we lack equilibrium between light and darkness.

As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.

It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have 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 opened for us.

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

Thoughts?

Meditations on the Muse

While spending a few days this week with Kerry Livgren, who has to be one of the most musical people I have ever been blessed to know, I have pondered the gift that is music. Here are various thoughts on the same from others. Let me know which ones resonate with you…


A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. ~Leopold Stokowski

Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. ~Berthold Auerbach

Without music life would be a mistake. ~Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons. You will find it is to the soul what a water bath is to the body. ~Oliver Wendell Holmes

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. ~Gustav Mahler

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass? ~Michael Torke

Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness. ~Maya Angelou

Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead. ~Benjamin Disraeli

Music is what feelings sound like. ~Author Unknown

If I ever die of a heart attack, I hope it will be from playing my stereo too loud. ~Anonymous

There's music in all things, if men had ears:
Their earth is but an echo of the spheres. ~Lord Byron

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not

shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. ~Henri Rabaud

Music is the poetry of the air. ~Richter

There is nothing in the world so much like prayer as music is. ~William P. Merrill

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life. ~Ludwig van Beethoven

Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years. ~William F. Buckley, Jr.

Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. ~Robert Fripp

Music's the medicine of the mind. ~John A. Logan

Music is the universal language of mankind. ~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Outre-Mer

He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once. ~Robert Browning

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. ~Victor Hugo

Music has been my playmate, my lover, and my crying towel. ~Buffy Sainte-Marie

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memory. ~Oscar Wilde

Its language is a language which the soul alone understands, but which the soul can never translate. ~Arnold Bennett

Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words. ~Robert G. Ingersoll

Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends. ~Alphonse de Lamartine

When words leave off, music begins. ~Heinrich Heine

Music is the shorthand of emotion. ~Leo Tolstoy

A jazz musician is a juggler who uses harmonies instead of oranges. ~Benny Green

Silence is the fabric upon which the notes are woven. ~Lawrence Duncan

Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without. ~Confucius

Music is love in search of a word. ~Sidney Lanier

It is incontestable that music induces in us a sense of the infinite and the contemplation of the invisible. ~Victor de LaPrade

Music is moonlight in the gloomy night of life. ~Jean Paul Richter

I worry that the person who thought up Muzak may be thinking up something else. ~Lily Tomlin

Thoughts?