Arthur Helps Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

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

Arthur Helps
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.

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

Arthur Helps
A great and frequent error in our judgment of human nature is to suppose that those sentiments and feelings have no existence, which may be only for a time concealed. The precious metals are not found at the surface of the earth, except in sandy places.

Arthur Helps
Infinite toil would not enable you to sweep away a mist; but by ascending a little you may often look over it altogether.

Arthur Helps
It is a weak thing to tell half your story, and then ask your friend's advice-a still weaker thing to take it.

Arthur Helps
No doubt hard work is a great police agent. If everybody were worked from morning till night, and then carefully locked up, the register of crime might be greatly diminished. But what would become of human nature? Where would be the room for growth in such a system of things? It is through sorrow and mirth, plenty and need, a variety of passions, circumstances, and temptations, even through sin and misery, that men's natures are developed.

Arthur Helps
It requires a strong mind to bear up against several languages. Some persons have learnt so many, that they have ceased to think in any one.

Arthur Helps
The world will find out that part of your character which concerns it: that which especially concerns yourself, it will leave for you to discover.

Arthur Helps
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.

Arthur Helps
Men of much depth of mind can bear a great deal of counsel; for it does not easily deface their own character, nor render their purposes indistinct.

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

Arthur Helps
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.

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

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

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

Arthur Helps
The world will tolerate many vices, but not their diminutives.

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

Arthur Helps
When we consider the incidents of former days, and perceive, while reviewing the long line of causes, how the most important events of our lives originated in the most trifling circumstances; how the beginning of our greatest happiness or greatest misery is to be attributed to a delay, to an accident, to a mistake; we learn a lesson of profound humility.

Arthur Helps
Some persons, instead of making a religion for their God, are content to make a god of their religion.

Arthur Helps
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.

Arthur Helps
Entrust a secret to one whose importance will not be much increased by divulging it.

Arthur Helps
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.

Arthur Helps
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.

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

Arthur Helps