Arthur Helps
The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice.Collection: Money
We all admire the wisdom of people who come to us for advice.Collection: Wisdom
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.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Inspirational
Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.Collection: Wisdom
In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.Collection: Success
Choose an author as you choose a friend.
Routine is not organization, any more than paralysis is order.
A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection.
A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.
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.
Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.
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.
The sense of danger is never, perhaps, so fully apprehended as when the danger has been overcome.
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.
Experience is the extract of suffering.
Every happiness is a hostage to fortune.
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.
Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.Collection: Book
Men rattle their chains-to manifest their freedom.Collection: Freedom
The worst use that can be made of success is to boast of it.Collection: Success
If you are often deceived by those around you, you may be sure that you deserve to be deceived; and that instead of railing at the general falseness of mankind, you have first to pronounce judgment on your own jealous tyranny, or on your own weak credulity.Collection: Jealous
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.Collection: Thinking
Tolerance is the only real test of civilization.Collection: Real
There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.Collection: Science
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.Collection: Views
I do not know any way so sure of making others happy as of being so oneself, to begin with.Collection: Happiness
It is quite impossible to understand the character of a person from one action, however striking that action may be.Collection: Character
It takes a great man to make a great listenerCollection: Men
The apparent foolishness of others is but too frequently our own ignorance.Collection: Ignorance
More than half the difficulties of the world would be allayed or removed by the exhibition of good temper.Collection: Would Be
We are pleased with one who instantly assents to our opinions, but we love a proselyte.Collection: Opinion
The most enthusiastic man in a cause is rarely chosen as the leader.Collection: Leadership
Any one who is much talked of be much maligned. This seems to be a harsh conclusion; but when you consider how much more given men are to depreciate than to appreciate, you will acknowledge that there is some truth in the saying.Collection: Men
Entrust a secret to one whose importance will not be much increased by divulging it.Collection: Secret
Extremely foolish advice is likely to be uttered by those who are looking at the laboring vessel from the land.Collection: Land
Infinite toil would not enable you to sweep away a mist; but by ascending a little you may often look over it altogether.Collection: Knowledge
No man, or woman, was ever cured of love by discovering the falseness of his or her lover. The living together for three long, rainy days in the country has done more to dispel love than all the perfidies in love that have ever been committed.Collection: Love
The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury, and wrong pass before their minds,--efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon.Collection: Drama
Those who are successfully to lead their fellow-men, should have once possessed the nobler feelings. We have all known individuals whose magnanimity was not likely to be troublesome on any occasion; but then they betrayed their own interests by unwisely omitting the consideration, that such feelings might exist in the breasts of those whom they had to guide and govern: for they themselves cannot even remember the time when in their eyes justice appeared preferable to expediency, the happiness of others to self-interest, or the welfare of a State to the advancement of a party.Collection: Leadership
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 could have no hold upon us if we ascended into a higher moral atmosphere.Collection: Atmosphere
We should lay up in our minds a store of goodly thoughts which will be a living treasure of knowledge always with us, and from which, at various times, and amidst all the shiftings of circumstances, we might be sure of drawing some comfort, guidance and sympathy.Collection: Life
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.Collection: Strong
There are few who would need advisers, if they were only accustomed to appeal to themselves in their calmest, holiest moments. If, when embarrassed with doubt as to any course of action, they would turn aside from the immediate tumult of the world, and from the vain speaking of those who "darken counsel by words without knowledge;" and would then commune with their hearts alone, at night, the heavens their silent counsellors, they would act not always in accordance with the wise men of this world, but with that wisdom which bringeth peace.Collection: Wise
War may be the game of kings, but, like the games at ancient Rome, it is generally exhibited to please and pacify the people.Collection: Kings
Selfishness, when it is punished by the world, is mostly punished because it is connected with egotism.Collection: Ego
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.Collection: Men
Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.Collection: Giving
It is in length of patience, endurance and forbearance that so much of what is good in mankind and womankind is shown.Collection: Patience