Arthur Helps Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

There is an honesty which is but decided selfishness in disguise. The person who will not refrain from expressing his or her sentiments and manifesting his or her feelings, however unfit the time, however inappropriate the place, however painful this expression may be, lays claim, forsooth, to our approbation as an honest person, and sneers at those of finer sensibilities as hypocrites.

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

Arthur Helps
Friendship is often outgrown; and his former child's clothes will no more fit a man than some of his former friendships. Arthur Helps,

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

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

Arthur Helps
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Arthur Helps
We should lay up in our minds a store of goodly thoughts which will be a living treasure of knowledge always with us, and from which, at various times, and amidst all the shiftings of circumstances, we might be sure of drawing some comfort, guidance and sympathy.

Arthur Helps
There is one statesman of the present day, of whom I always say that he would have escaped making the blunders that he has made if he had only ridden more in buses.

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

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

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
If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

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

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

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 quite impossible to understand the character of a person from one action, however striking that action may be.

Arthur Helps