The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot…

The sentence comes from a letter that Helen Keller wrote on 8 June 1891 to the Reverend Phillips Brooks, the Boston preacher who had talked with her about God. Sending him her photograph, she explains that she used to wish she could see pictures with her hands, as she does statues. Now she rarely thinks of it, because “my dear Father has filled my mind with beautiful pictures, even of things I cannot see.” Then she recalls how happy she was when her teacher told her this.

“If the light were not in your eyes,” she writes, he would understand that happiness better. The day before, she adds, she had thought for the first time “what a beautiful thing motion was”.

Deaf and blind since an illness in infancy, Helen was ten, the pupil of Anne Sullivan, her “teacher”. The letter was published in 1903 in The Story of My Life, written while she studied at Radcliffe College. The sentence is often quoted slightly altered: the best things “must be felt with the heart”.

Letter to the Reverend Phillips Brooks (The Story of My Life), Part II, letters; published in 1903, 1891

Checked word for word in the work itself.

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