More Poems From My Commonplace Book - The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller

Hey everyone! A couple of months ago, I finished the autobiography of Helen Keller's life, The Story of my Life. The book is actually pretty short, as it only covers the first twenty or so years of her life, and I was able to finish it in about a month. While I was reading it, I highlighted some of my favorite passages and put them into my commonplace book (which you can read about here). I really enjoyed this book, and I would highly recommend it as not only an interesting story, but a really inspiring story of how deafness and blindness can't stop God from reaching out to people. His love is unstoppable! I hope you enjoy these quotes!

"There is nothing more beautiful, I think, than the evanescent fleeting images and sentiments presented by a language one is just becoming familiar with--ideas that flit across the mental sky, shaped and tinted by capricious fancy."

"Such knowledge floods the soul unseen with a soundless tidal wave of deepening thought. 'Knowledge is power.' Rather, knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge--broad, deep knowledge--is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man's progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life."

"The one I felt and still feel most is lack of time. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit, which one hears only in leisure moments when the words of some loved poet touch a deep, sweet chord in the soul that until then had been silent."

"The story of Ruth, too--how Oriental it is! Yet how different is the life of these simple country folks from that of the Persian capital! Ruth is so loyal and gentle-hearted, we cannot help loving her, as she stands with the reapers amid the waving corn. Her beautiful, unselfish spirit shines out like a bright star in the night of a dark and cruel age. Love like Ruth's, love which can rise above conflicting creeds and deep-seated racial prejudices, is hard to find in all the world.

The Bible gives me a deep, comforting sense that 'things seen are temporal, and things unseen are eternal.' "