Sir Arthur Helps KCB HonDCL (10 July 1813 – 7 March 1875) was an English writer and dean of the Privy Council. He was a Cambridge Apostle.
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.
Many know how to please, but know not when they have ceased to give pleasure.
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.
Do not shun this maxim because it is common-place. On the contrary, take the closest heed of what observant men, who would probably like to show originality, are yet constrained to repeat. Therein lies the marrow of the wisdom of the world.
What a blessing this smoking is! Perhaps the greatest that we owe to the discovery of America.
You cannot ensure the gratitude of others for a favour conferred upon them in the way which is most agreeable to yourself.
The sense of danger is never, perhaps, so fully apprehended as when the danger has been overcome.
Men rattle their chains-to manifest their freedom.
Experience is the extract of suffering.
I do not know of any sure way of making others happy as being so one's self.
Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the mountain of despair and melancholy.
When we consider the incidents of former days, and perceive, while reviewing the long line of causes, how the most important events of our lives originated in the most trifling circumstances; how the beginning of our greatest happiness or greatest misery is to be attributed to a delay, to an accident, to a mistake; we learn a lesson of profound humility.
We are pleased with one who instantly assents to our opinions, but we love a proselyte.
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.
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.
Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.
The most enthusiastic man in a cause is rarely chosen as the leader.
Alas! it is not the child but the boy that generally survives in the man.
The reasons which any man offers to you for his own conduct betray his opinion of your character.
Is boredom anything less than the sense of one's faculties slowly dying?