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the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen nor even touched, but just felt in the heart

When I find my work particularly difficult and discouraging, she writes me letters that make me feel glad and brave; for she is one of those from whom we learn that one painful duty fulfilled makes the next plainer and easier.

I loved "Little Women" because it gave me a sense of kinship with girls and boys who could see and hear.

Their life seems an immense disparity between effort and opportunity.

Those are red-letter days in our lives when we meet people who thrill us like a fine poem, people whose handshake is brimful of unspoken sympathy, and whose sweet, rich natures impart to our eager, impatient spirits a wonderful restfulness which, in its essence, is divine.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

At the beginning I was only a little mass of possibilities. It was my teacher who unfolded and developed them.

There, too, after a fit of temper, I went to find comfort and to hide my hot face in the cool leaves and grass.

If happiness is to be so measured, I who cannot hear or see have every reason to sit in a corner with folded hands and weep.

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

I am never discouraged by absence of good. I never can be argued into hopelessness.

The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life.

But I did not dream that that interview would be the door through which I should pass from darkness into light, from isolation to friendship, companionship, knowledge, love.

Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, "There is joy in self-forgetfulness." So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness.

But I have found out that though the ways in which I can make myself useful are few, yet the work open to me is endless.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised

A man must understand evil and be acquainted with sorrow before he can write himself an optimist and expect others to believe that he has reason for the faith that is in him.

All the best of me belongs to her--there is not a talent, or an aspiration or a joy in me that has not been awakened by her loving touch.

Some one took it, and I was caught up and held close in the arms of her who had come to reveal all things to me, and, more than all things else, to love me.

But afterward, when I was restored to my human heritage, Mildred and I grew into each other's hearts, so that we were content to go hand-in-hand wherever caprice led us, although she could not understand my finger language, nor I her childish prattle.

Children who hear acquire language without any particular effort; the words that fall from others' lips they catch on the wing, as it were, delightedly, while the little deaf child must trap them by a slow and often painful process.

As I look back on my struggle to write that little story, it seems to me that I must have had a prophetic vision of the good that would come of the undertaking, or I should surely have failed.

What a joy it is to feel the soft, springy earth under my feet once more, to follow grassy roads that lead to ferny brooks where I can bathe my fingers in a cataract of rippling notes, or to clamber over a stone wall into green fields that tumble and roll and climb in riotous gladness!

My share in the work of the world may be limited; but the fact that it is work makes it precious.

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.