Arthur Helps (1813–75) was an English essayist, historian, and dean of the Privy Council. He was also a Cambridge Apostle (i.e., member of the University of Cambridge intellectual society) and an early proponent of animal rights.
Born in Streatham in South London, Helps attended Trinity College-Cambridge. He started his career as private secretary, first to Chancellor of the Exchequer Thomas Spring Rice and then to Chief Secretary for Ireland George Howard, 7th Earl of Carlisle. Helps received an inheritance in 1842 that allowed him to purchase an estate in Hampshire and commit himself to literary work and social reform.
Helps’s most successful works are two series discoursing on social, political, and literary themes, entitled Friends in Council (1847–49 and 1859.) In 1860, he became Clerk of the Privy Council and served until his death. This appointment brought him into contact with Queen Victoria, for whom he edited excerpts from her journal, published as Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands (1868.) He also wrote The Spanish Conquest in America (4 vols., 1855–61,) Organization in Daily Life, an Essay (1862,) Casimir Maremma (1870,) Brevia, Short Essays and Aphorisms (1871,) Thoughts upon Government (1872,) Life and Labors of Mr. Thomas Brassey (1872,) Iras de Biron (1874,) and Social Pressure (1875.)
Helps was an early advocate of animal rights. His Some Talk About Animals and Their Masters (1873) is notable for extending rights even to insects.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Arthur Helps
Selfishness, when it is punished by the world, is mostly punished because it is connected with egotism.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Selfishness
Many a man has a kind of kaleidoscope, where the broken bits of glass are his own merits and fortunes; and they fall into harmonious arrangements and delight him, often most mischievously, and to his ultimate detriment; but they are a present pleasure.
—Arthur Helps
The perverse temper of children is too often corrected with the rod, when the cause lies in fact in a diseased state of body.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Temper
There is a gift that is almost a blow, and there is a kind word that is munilicence; so much is there in the way of doing things.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Gifts
Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Simplicity
The greatest luxury of riches is, that they enable you to escape so much good advice.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Luxury
Be cheerful: do not brood over fond hopes unrealized until a chain is fastened on each thought and wound around the heart. Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the monument of despair and melancholy.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Cheerfulness
Temperament is but the atmosphere of character, while its groundwork in nature is fixed and unchangeable.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Temper
Alas! it is not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Men
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
Topics: Decisions
It is a good thing to believe; it is a good thing to admire. By continually looking upwards, our minds will themselves grow upwards; as a man, by indulging in habits of scorn and contempt for others, is sure to descend to the level of those he despises.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Admiration
The man, at the head of the house, can mar the pleasure of the household, but he cannot make it.—That must rest with the woman, and it is her greatest privilege.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Men, Men & Women, Marriage, Women
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Quotations, Kindness, Service, Compassion
All other passions condescend at times to accept the inexorable logic of facts; but jealousy looks facts straight in the face, and ignores them utterly, and says she knows a great deal better than they can tell her.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Jealousy
It is better in some respects to be admired by those with whom you live,, than to be loved by them. And this is not on account of any gratification of vanity, but because admiration is so much more tolerant than love.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Admiration
Offended vanity is the great separator in social life.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Vanity
In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Organization, Business
Patience is even more rarely manifested in the intellect than it is in the temper.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Patience
Experience is the extract of suffering.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Experience
It takes a great man to make a good listener.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Listening
A sceptical young man said to Dr. Parr that he would believe nothing which he could not understand. “Then,” said the Doctor, “your creed will be the shortest of any man’s I know.”
—Arthur Helps
To hear always, to think always, to learn always, it is thus that we live truly; he who aspires to nothing, and learns nothing, is not worthy of living.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Improvement
Routine is not organization, any more than paralysis is order.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Organization
I do not know of any sure way of making others happy as being so oneself.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Happiness
We all admire the wisdom of people who come to us for advice.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Admiration, Advice
The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom return the compliment.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Advice
Infinite toil would not enable you to sweep away a mist; but by ascending a little you may often look over it altogether. So it is with our moral improvement; we wrestle fiercely with a vicious habit, which would have no hold upon us if we ascended into a higher moral atmosphere.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Improvement, Knowledge
More than half the difficulties of the world would be allayed or removed by the exhibition of good temper.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Temper
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