Arthur Helps Quotes
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Friendship is often outgrown; and his former child’s clothes will no more fit a man than some of his former friendships.
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Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?
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It requires a strong mind to bear up against several languages. Some persons have learnt so many, that they have ceased to think in any one.
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No man ever praised two persons equally – and pleased them both.
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Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long. Pleasure and business labor equally under this defect, or, as I should rather say, this fatal super-abundance.
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How often we should stop in the pursuit of folly, if it were not for the difficulties that continually beckon us onwards.
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The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice. The rich are always advising the poor; but the poor seldom return the compliment.
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Do not mistake energy for enthusiasm; the softest speakers are often the most enthusiastic of men.
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You must work for yourself; for what you reject may be as important for you to have seen and thought about, as what you adopt.
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Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the mountain of despair and melancholy.
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There is nothing so easily made offensive as good reasoning; and men of clear logical minds, if not gifted at the same time with tact, make more enemies than men with bad hearts and unsound understandings.
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Even the most careless people have a sort of aversion to signing things which they have never considered.
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Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
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The more truth you can get into any business, the better. Let the other side know the defects of yours, let them know how you are to be satisfied, let there be as little to be found as possible (I should say nothing), and if your business be an honest one, it will be best tended in this way.
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Experience is the extract of suffering.
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Some persons, instead of making a religion for their God, are content to make a god of their religion.
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Soothe the present as much as we may; look forward as hopefully as we can to the future, still the dreadful past must overshadow us.
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We are pleased with one who instantly assents to our opinions, but we love a proselyte.
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A sceptical young man one day conversing with the celebrated Dr. Parr, observed that he would believe nothing which he could not understand. "Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man's I know."
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Our knowledge of human nature is for the most part empirical; and it would often be better, if, instead of endeavouring to say some new things ourselves, we were to confirm without more words the sayings of another.
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Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.
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A great and frequent error in our judgment of human nature is to suppose that those sentiments and feelings have no existence, which may be only for a time concealed. The precious metals are not found at the surface of the earth, except in sandy places.
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It takes a great man to make a great listener.
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We are not so easily guided by our most prominent weaknesses as by those of which we are least aware.