Arthur Helps
Writer
1813-07-10 – 1875-03-07
English writer and civil servant who served as Clerk of the Privy Council. He wrote essays and dialogues on ethics, social questions, and governance and was an early advocate for animal welfare. He died in 1875.
Quotes by Arthur Helps
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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.
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Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.
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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.
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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.
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Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.
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Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.
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If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.
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Many know how to please, but know not when they have ceased to give pleasure.
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Wise sayings often fall on barren ground; but a kind word is never thrown away.
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It takes a great man to make a good listener.
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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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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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The reasons which any man offers to you for his own conduct betray his opinion of your character.
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