Arthur Helps Quotes

Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.

Routine is not organization, any more than paralysis is order.

Keep your feet on the ground, but let your heart soar as high as it will. Refuse to be average or to surrender to the chill of your spiritual environment.

A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.

In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.

Every happiness is a hostage to fortune.

To hear always, to think always, to learn always, it is thus that we live truly. He who aspires to nothing, who learns nothing, is not worthy of living.

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

He who is continually changing his point of view sees more, and more clearly, than one who, statue-like, forever stands upon the same pedestal; however lofty and well-placed that pedestal may be.

There are no better cosmetics than a severe temperance and purity, modesty and humility, a gracious temper and calmness of spirit; and there is no true beauty without the signatures of these graces in the very countenance.

Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.

It takes a great man to make a great listener

Do not be deceived into thinking that how a man acts is the full picture.

Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?

Selfishness, when it is punished by the world, is mostly punished because it is connected with egotism.

Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.

No man, or woman, was ever cured of love by discovering the falseness of his or her lover. The living together for three long, rainy days in the country has done more to dispel love than all the perfidies in love that have ever been committed.

We are pleased with one who instantly assents to our opinions, but we love a proselyte.

No man who has not sat in the assemblies of men can know the light, odd and uncertain ways in which decisions are often arrived at.

A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection.

The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice.

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

I do not know any way so sure of making others happy as of being so oneself, to begin with.

You cannot ensure the gratitude of others for a favour conferred upon them in the way which is most agreeable to yourself.

The apparent foolishness of others is but too frequently our own ignorance.

The sense of danger is never, perhaps, so fully apprehended as when the danger has been overcome.

Most terrors are but spectral illusions. Only have the courage of the man who could walk up to his spectre seated in the chair before him, and sit down upon it; the horrid thing will not partake the chair with you.

What a blessing this smoking is! Perhaps the greatest that we owe to the discovery of America.

War may be the game of kings, but, like the games at ancient Rome, it is generally exhibited to please and pacify the people.

No man has ever praised to persons equally-and pleased them both.

Do not shun this maxim because it is common-place. On the contrary, take the closest heed of what observant men, who would probably like to show originality, are yet constrained to repeat. Therein lies the marrow of the wisdom of the world.

We are not so easily guided by our most prominent weaknesses as by those of which we are least aware.

Many know how to please, but know not when they have ceased to give pleasure.

Any one who is much talked of be much maligned. This seems to be a harsh conclusion; but when you consider how much more given men are to depreciate than to appreciate, you will acknowledge that there is some truth in the saying.

Alas! it is not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.

An official man is always an official man, and has a wild belief in the value of Reports.

A sceptical young man one day conversing with the celebrated Dr. Parr, observed that he would believe nothing which he could not understand. "Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man's I know."

Simple ignorance has in its time been complimented by the names of most of the vices, and of all the virtues.

It has always appeared to me, that there is so much to be done in this world, that all self-inflicted suffering which cannot be turned to good account for others, is a loss - a loss, if you may so express it, to the spiritual world.

Those who never philosophized until they met with disappointments, have mostly become disappointed philosophers

The man who could withstand, with his fellow-men in single line, a charge of cavalry may lose all command of himself on the occurrence of a fire in his own house, because of some homely reminiscence unknown to the observing bystander.

They tell us that "Pity is akin to Love;" if so, Pity must be a poor relation.

Pride, if not the origin, is the medium of all wickedness-the atmosphere without which it would instantly die away.

People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.

Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.

There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.

Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the mountain of despair and melancholy.

The very best financial presentation is one that's well thought out and anticipates any questions... answering them in advance.

The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury, and wrong pass before their minds,--efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon.