Top 80 Arthur Helps Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Tolerance is the only real test of civilization.”

— Arthur Helps

2. “In a balanced organization, working towards a common objective, there is success.”

— Arthur Helps

3. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

4. “Experience is the extract of suffering.”

— Arthur Helps

5. “People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.”

— Arthur Helps

6. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

7. “Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.”

— Arthur Helps

8. “Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.”

— Arthur Helps

Featured in: Reading Quotes

9. “Men rattle their chains-to manifest their freedom.”

— Arthur Helps

10. “They tell us that “Pity is akin to Love;” if so, Pity must be a poor relation.”

— Arthur Helps

11. “If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.”

— Arthur Helps

12. “Wisdom is seldom gained without suffering.”

— Arthur Helps

13. “Most terrors are but spectral illusions. Only have the courage of the man who could walk up to his spectre seated in the chair before him, and sit down upon it; the horrid thing will not partake the chair with you.”

— Arthur Helps

14. “War may be the game of kings, but, like the games at ancient Rome, it is generally exhibited to please and pacify the people.”

— Arthur Helps

15. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

16. “Many a man has a kind of a kaleidoscope, where the bits of broken 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

17. “The sense of danger is never, perhaps, so fully apprehended as when the danger has been overcome.”

— Arthur Helps

18. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

19. “A man’s action is only a picture book of his creed.”

— Arthur Helps

20. “Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the mountain of despair and melancholy.”

— Arthur Helps

21. “Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.”

— Arthur Helps

22. “Is boredom anything less than the sense of one’s faculties slowly dying?”

— Arthur Helps

23. “Always win fools first. They talk much, and what they have once uttered they will stick to; whereas there is always time, up to the last moment, to bring before a wise man arguments that may entirely change his opinion.”

— Arthur Helps

24. “Offended vanity is the great separator in social life.”

— Arthur Helps

25. “The greatest luxury of riches is that they enable you to escape so much good advice.”

— Arthur Helps

26. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

27. “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

28. “A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection.”

— Arthur Helps

29. “It is in length of patience, endurance and forbearance that so much of what is good in mankind and womankind is shown.”

— Arthur Helps

30. “Do not be deceived into thinking that how a man acts is the full picture.”

— Arthur Helps

31. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

Featured in: Strong Quotes

32. “It is quite impossible to understand the character of a person from one action, however striking that action may be.”

— Arthur Helps

33. “The reasons which any man offers to you for his own conduct betray his opinion of your character.”

— Arthur Helps

34. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

35. “Every happiness is a hostage to fortune.”

— Arthur Helps

36. “The measure of civilization in a people is to be found in its just appreciation of the wrongfulness of war.”

— Arthur Helps

37. “Men of much depth of mind can bear a great deal of counsel; for it does not easily deface their own character, nor render their purposes indistinct.”

— Arthur Helps

38. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

39. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

40. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

41. “Simple ignorance has in its time been complimented by the names of most of the vices, and of all the virtues.”

— Arthur Helps

42. “What a blessing this smoking is! Perhaps the greatest that we owe to the discovery of America.”

— Arthur Helps

43. “The man who could withstand, with his fellow-men in single line, a charge of cavalry may lose all command of himself on the occurrence of a fire in his own house, because of some homely reminiscence unknown to the observing bystander.”

— Arthur Helps

44. “You cannot ensure the gratitude of others for a favour conferred upon them in the way which is most agreeable to yourself.”

— Arthur Helps

45. “The thing which makes one man greater than another, the quality by which we ought to measure greatness, is a man’s capacity for loving.”

— Arthur Helps

46. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

47. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

48. “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.”

— Arthur Helps

49. “We are not so easily guided by our most prominent weaknesses as by those of which we are least aware.”

— Arthur Helps

50. “The world will find out that part of your character which concerns it: that which especially concerns yourself, it will leave for you to discover.”

— Arthur Helps