Sir Arthur Helps KCB HonDCL (1813–75) was an English writer and dean of the Privy Council. He was a Cambridge Apostle. The youngest son of London merchant Thomas Helps, Arthur Helps was born in Streatham in South London.
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Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Simplicity
Offended vanity is the great separator in social life.
—Arthur Helps
It takes a great man to make a good listener.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Listening
Alas! it is not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Men
The greatest luxury of riches is, that they enable you to escape so much good advice.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Luxury
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
Routine is not organization, any more than paralysis is order.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Organization
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
More than half the difficulties of the world would be allayed or removed by the exhibition of good temper.
—Arthur Helps
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
Patience is even more rarely manifested in the intellect than it is in the temper.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Patience
The rich are always advising the poor, but the poor seldom return the compliment.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Advice
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
We all admire the wisdom of people who come to us for advice.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Advice
In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Organization, Business
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Service, Kindness, Quotations, Compassion
I do not know of any sure way of making others happy as being so oneself.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Happiness
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
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
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
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: Knowledge
Temperament is but the atmosphere of character, while its groundwork in nature is fixed and unchangeable.
—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
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
Experience is the extract of suffering.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Experience
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
Selfishness, when it is punished by the world, is mostly punished because it is connected with egotism.
—Arthur Helps
Topics: Selfishness
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