Source identified
“Life is a boundless privilege.”
The sentence frames existence as abundant possibility rather than mere duration, encouraging attention to what can still be learned, attempted, appreciated, and created.
Source note: The Conduct of Life; Emerson uses the line while describing life as an expanding field of experience rather than a narrowly fixed allotment.
Source identified
“With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.”
Language is remembered as opening several capacities at once—thought, hope and a fuller experience of living—rather than merely adding a vocabulary item.
Source note: Optimism: An Essay (1903), Project Gutenberg #31622. Keller is reflecting on her own early experience of language and education.
Source identified
“It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.”
Attention and attitude can influence enjoyment by making a person more willing to notice possibilities for interest and pleasure in ordinary circumstances.
Source note: Anne of Green Gables; Anne describes deliberate enjoyment as a practiced attitude toward experience.
Source identified
“Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence.”
Wonder does not disappear when circumstances are limited; attention can still discover interest and meaning in conditions others might dismiss.
Source note: The Story of My Life; Keller reflects on finding experience and interest even within darkness and silence.
Source identified
“although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.”
The sentence holds suffering and human overcoming together, giving Keller’s optimism a basis in endurance rather than pretending suffering is absent.
Source note: Optimism: An Essay (1903), Project Gutenberg #31622. The surrounding passage explicitly says her optimism does not rest on the absence of evil.
Source identified
“Something had come to replace his hoard which gave a growing purpose to the earnings, drawing his hope and joy continually onward beyond the money.”
Voice: Narrator voice · Narrator
Money changes meaning when it serves a person rather than replacing relationship; caring for Eppie gives Silas’s work a forward-looking purpose that wealth alone had failed to provide.
Source note: Silas Marner; Eliot contrasts the former hoard with Eppie, whose needs and future redirect Silas’s earnings toward hope, relationship, and practical care.