Helen Keller was born in Tuscumbia, Alabama on June 27, 1880. At the age of 19 months, she lost her sight and hearing as a result of meningitis.

Her pilgrimage from Tuscumbia to worldwide recognition, is an inspiring story which took her from silence and darkness to a life of vision and advocacy. Against overwhelming odds, she waged a seemingly impossible battle to re-enter the world she had lost.

With the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, she became the first blind-deaf person to effectively communicate with the sighted and hearing world. In so doing, she became an international celebrity from the age of eight, even before the era of mass communications.

Escaping from the "double dungeon of darkness and silence," Helen Keller grew into a world famous, highly intelligent, articulate and sensitive woman who wrote, spoke and labored incessantly for the betterment of others. After graduating college in 1904, she announced that her life would be dedicated to the amelioration of blindness.

Throughout her life, she regarded herself as a “world citizen”, visiting 35 countries on five continents between 1939 and 1957. Helen Keller was one of the most powerful symbols of triumph over adversity our era has produced, leading Winston Churchill to call her, "the greatest woman of our age."

Helen Keller published 12 books. She met every President of the United States from Calvin Coolidge to John F. Kennedy. In 1968, Senator Lister Hill eulogized her as "one of the few persons not born to die." She will always be known as "the first lady of courage.”

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

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.

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

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.

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 an unchartered land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.

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

People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.

Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything good in the world.

Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousand of miles and all the years you have lived.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt within the heart.

We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.

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.

When we do the best that we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

The highest result of education is tolerance.

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.

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