Visiting Helen Keller’s Home

Tony Cooke

This past Saturday (January 25, 2025), I had the great pleasure of visiting the birthplace and childhood home of Helen Keller with Pastor Tony and Tara Collins. 

After the Saturday seminar, Pastor Tony and Tara Collins and I drove to Tuscumbia, AL to visit this notable historical site. Helen (1880-1968) became totally deaf and blind when she was only nineteen months old. Her parents arranged for her to be tutored by Anne Sullivan, and that began a forty-nine-year relationship. 

In spite of her disabilities, Helen went on to graduate from Radcliff College (now associated with Harvard), authored fourteen books and gave more than 475 speeches and essays. Her advocacy for the disabled took her to thirty-nine countries on five continent. The guide at her home told us that Helen “read” the Bible every day, and she is pictured below by all of the books of the Old and New Testament in braille.

Quotes by Helen Keller

“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.”

“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.”

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

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

“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.”

“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.”

“A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships.”

“No one has a right to consume happiness without producing it.”

“True happiness… is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”