Quotes

Olivia Denison

Mr. Salsich

English 9

16 September 2008

Greatness in Patience;

A Comparison of Two Quotes, One said by Rainer Maria Rilke and the Other by Helen Keller

Patience is a great quality that not many people have. People that have it are strong within, because you aren’t just born with a gift like patience. Think about the word patience for a minute. What does it mean to you? It is a very strong word that rarely applies to the ordinary person. Rainer Maria Rilke, a poet, tells us, “to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart”, and Helen Keller demonstrates patience in her own life.

As a blind and deaf girl, Helen couldn’t do many things. However, the two things she could do better than anyone else were sensing how people felt and touching people. Learning sign language is very difficult, especially if you’re blind. Therefore, patience is needed when confronted with an obstacle like this. Helen could feel the shape of the person’s hand in order to figure out how sign language was done, and she could also feel a shape of an object in her hand. In order to do this, she would have to keep reviewing the object repeatedly until she knew what the object was. Repeating this process took a lot of fortitude. Helen Keller once said, “The most beautiful things in life…are felt in the heart”, which is true because the most direct way to connect with a person is to touch them in the heart. The way you choose your words is how you make an impression on someone. Words are very powerful. The way words are expressed or the way you want them to be heard can make a person like you or not. Patience is a gift, but it can also be developed and improved over time. It must be practiced with people and with obstacles.

A wise German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, once said, “try to love the questions themselves…or books written in a very foreign language.” Life is a foreign language, you cannot envision what’s going to happen next; you cannot read the future. This applies to Helen Keller. She couldn’t read the future and life was a foreign language to her, especially while trying to learn sign language. Ms. Keller had to work for the answers her whole life and finding the answers wasn’t easy, but as Rilke said, “You will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” The answers didn’t come to Helen Keller quickly. Keller “gradually” learned to speak a foreign language. Helen Keller had a very long life and was forced “to live her way into the answers. She “gradually, without even noticing it” learned how to communicate with people. When Helen first started to learn sign language, she didn’t know what she was doing; she could only hope that she was doing it right. Eventually when she got older, Helen got all her answers to her questions about sign language and life. It took a great deal of patience for Ms. Keller to learn what she did.

Helen Keller’s only advantage over other people was her patience. Because of her disabilities and the patience that she needed to overcome them, she could sense how people and things felt, better than anybody else. She possessed patience and that patience sculpted her into the great woman that she was. It took a long time to sculpt her though. That’s why patience is such a superb thing to possess, because it allows you to become a better person and better educated about life.