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Every happiness is a hostage to fortune.

Arthur Helps

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Arthur Helps
Age: 61 †
Born: 1813
Born: July 10
Died: 1875
Died: March 7
Biographer
Historian
Writer
Sir Arthur Helps
Hostage
Fortune
Happiness
Every

More quotes by Arthur Helps

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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.
Arthur Helps
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Routine is not organization, any more than paralysis is order.
Arthur Helps
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It is in length of patience, endurance and forbearance that so much of what is good in mankind and womankind is shown.
Arthur Helps
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Some persons, instead of making a religion for their God, are content to make a god of their religion.
Arthur Helps
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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.
Arthur Helps
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It takes a great man to make a great listener
Arthur Helps
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A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.
Arthur Helps
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There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.
Arthur Helps
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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
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What a blessing this smoking is! Perhaps the greatest that we owe to the discovery of America.
Arthur Helps
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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
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It is a weak thing to tell half your story, and then ask your friend's advice-a still weaker thing to take it.
Arthur Helps
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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.
Arthur Helps
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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.
Arthur Helps
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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
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The apparent foolishness of others is but too frequently our own ignorance.
Arthur Helps
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It is better in some respects to be admired by those with whom you live than to be loved by them and this not on account of any gratification of vanity, but because admiration is so much more tolerant than love.
Arthur Helps
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Infinite toil would not enable you to sweep away a mist but by ascending a little you may often look over it altogether.
Arthur Helps
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Selfishness, when it is punished by the world, is mostly punished because it is connected with egotism.
Arthur Helps
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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