Arthur Helps's Quotes

Every happiness is a hostage to fortune.

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

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.

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.

Strength is born in the deep silence of long-suffering hearts; not amid joy.

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

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

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

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

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

We all admire the wisdom of people who come to us for advice.

Choose an author as you choose a friend.

Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.

Experience is the extract of suffering.

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

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

The man of the house can destroy the pleasure of the household, but he cannot make it. That rests with the woman, and it is her greatest privilege.

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

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.

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.

Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act.

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

There are men whom a happy disposition, a strong desire of glory and esteem, inspire with the same love for justice and virtue which men in general have for riches and honors... But the number of these men is so small that I only mention them in honor of humanity.