Arthur Helps Quotes

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

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.

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

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

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

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.

Men rattle their chains-to manifest their freedom.

The worst use that can be made of success is to boast of it.

Tolerance is the only real test of civilization.

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.

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

It takes a great man to make a great listener

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.

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

Experience is the extract of suffering.

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.

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

A great many wise sayings have been uttered about the effects of solitary retirement; but the motives which impel men to seek it are not more various than the effects which it produces on different individuals. One thing is certain, that those who can with truth affirm that they are "never less alone than when alone," might generally add that they never feel more lonely than when not alone.

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

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

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

Every happiness is a hostage to fortune.

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

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