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Gizmotude Quotation Archives

 

Help

If we are strong, our character will speak for itself. If we are weak, words will be of no help. [Undelivered address, Dallas, November 22, 1963] ~~ John F. Kennedy

 

[On motherhood:] Nothing else will make you as happy or as sad, as proud or as tired, for nothing is quite as hard as helping a person develop his own individuality -- especially while you struggle to keep your own. ~~ Marguerite Kelly and Elia Parsons

 

It should be the function of medicine to help people die young as late in life as possible. ~~ Ernst Wynder

 

I think the first song I ever wrote … was called "Can't Help Thinking About Me." That's an illuminating little piece, isn't it? ~~ David Bowie

 

You can't help a man uphill without getting closer to the top yourself. ~~ Unattributed

 

We ought to be careful not to do for a fellow what we only intended to help him do. ~~ Frank A. Clark

 

Broken hearts heal slowly, but a speedy application of chocolate can often help stop the initial bleeding. ~~ Ashleigh Brilliant

 

You can't help getting older but you don't have to get old. ~~ George Burns

 

I used a little cuckoo clock to help cheer me up when I was in the hospital. It's hard to maintain a bummer when a little bird jumps out of a box and hoots at you every half hour. It worked wonders for me in my own convalescence. Whenever the cuckoo would pop out of the clock I would attempt to squirt it with my water pistol. I was so successful at this that eventually the damn thing just rusted in place. ~~ Wavy Gravy

 

People think that if [their abusive] parent apologizes, he'll turn into the person they needed him to be. He won't. An apology might help, but you can change your life without one. ~~ Robin Quivers

 

A man is ethical only when life, as such, is sacred to him, that of plants and animals as well as that of his fellowman, and when he devotes himself helpfully to all life that is in need of help. ~~ Albert Schweitzer

 

The methods that help a man acquire a fortune are the very ones that keep him from enjoying it. ~~ Antoine de Rivarol

 

I used to feel that all I ever did was take from my father: "Dad, my heater's not working." "Dad, I need help building the shed." "Dad, can you lend me money for a car?" Now he has a computer. Things are evening up quickly. ~~ Den Schlaf

 

Chinatown [in Honolulu was] intentionally burned in 1900 … to stop the spread of bubonic plague. Only three buildings were planned to be burned … but strong wings helped fan a fire that destroyed 40 acres of homes and businesses. ~~ Ed Cassidy

 

There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who knows he is going under, in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man. What is left of that man flees from what is left of human attention. ~~ James Baldwin

 

As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it. ~~ Mohandas K. Gandhi

 

Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life. ~~ Sandra Carey

 

Money, if it does not bring you happiness, will at least help you to miserable in comfort. ~~ Lord Mancroft

 

If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. ~~ John F. Kennedy

 

He has a right to criticize who has a heart to help. ~~ Abraham Lincoln

 

Few things help an individual more than to place responsibility upon him, and to let him know that you trust him. ~~ Booker T. Washington

 

Discover someone to help shoulder your misfortunes, then you will never be alone … neither fate, nor the crowd, so readily attacks two. ~~ Baltasar Gracian

 

There is at least one good thing you can say about punctuality -- it is a sure way to help you enjoy a few minutes of complete privacy. ~~ O. A. Battista

 

It's a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners. But drowning would help. ~~ Mark Twain

 

If the human race wants to go to Hell in a basket, technology can help it get there by jet. ~~ Charles M. Allen

 

Cats can't help being curious; it's in their genes. I realize that. But if curiosity killed the cat, this one is asking for it. Other cats are curious -- this cat is downright nosy. What's inside the sink cupboards? Behind the refrigerator? Down the hot-air registers? On top of the television? Beneath the papers on my desk. ~~ Maynard Good Stoddard

 

I can't think of any sorrow in the world that a hot bath wouldn't help, just a little bit. ~~ Susan Glaspell

 

It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in. ~~ Arthur Christopher Benson

 

Shut out all of your past except that which will help you weather your tomorrows. ~~ Sir William Osler

 

The only reason I always try to meet and know the parents better is because it helps me to forgive their children. ~~ Louis Johannot

 

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape and significance of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him. ~~ Dylan Thomas

 

I'd like to live in a country where the official motto was, "You never know." It would help me relax. ~~ George Carlin

 

Help with deeds, not with words. ~~ Desiderius Erasmus

 

An agnostic found himself in trouble, and a friend suggested that he pray. "How can I pray when I do not know whether or not there is a God?" he asked. "If you are lost in the forest," his friend replied, "you do not wait until you find someone before shouting for help." ~~ Dan Plies

 

If God helps alone those who help themselves, it is a bitter criticism of Him that He cruelly neglects those who for one reason or another cannot help themselves. ~~ George Jean Nathan

 

With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God's work must truly be our own. ~~ John F. Kennedy

 

Great men help dazzle the people; … after that, they dazzle themselves even more dangerously. ~~ Cardinal de Retz

 

God help those who do not help themselves. ~~ Wilson Mizner

 

Trying to help an oppressed person is like trying to put your arm around somebody with a sunburn. ~~ Florynce Kennedy

 

God helps those who help themselves. ~~ German proverb

 

Some citizens are so good that nothing a leader can do will make them better. Others are so incorrigible that nothing can be done to improve them. But the great bulk of the people go with the moral tide of the moment. The leader must help create that tide. ~~ Unattributed

 

One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another. ~~ Gerald Brenan

 

A lawyer is someone who helps you get what is coming to him. ~~ Unattributed

 

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. ~~ William James

 

Education does not make us smarter, it merely propels us further and faster in the direction of our native abilities; and if one's ability is to make a fool of himself, education can help him do a magnificent job of that. ~~ Sydney J. Harris

 

If you are a parent it helps if you are a grownup. ~~ Eda J. LeShan

 

[As she was helped over the rail of the Titanic:] I rang for ice, but this is ridiculous. ~~ Madeline Talmadge Astor

 

According to a University of Pennsylvania study, making your marriage and family a high priority pays off at work… The students who said they valued a strong family life ended up with higher earnings than those whose top goals included finding a stead job or having a lot of money. Researchers theorize that support from a strong family helps workers by offsetting the strain of their workplace problems. ~~ Chicago Tribune

 

[To women in abusive relationships:] If they do it once, they'll do it again… If you think you can fix people like this, you can't. You've got to get away from them. The best place to find a helping hand is at the end of your own arm. ~~ Naomi Judd

 

I like to help women help themselves, as that is, in my opinion, the best way to settle the woman question. Whatever we can do and do well we have a right to, and I don't think any one will deny us. ~~ Louisa May Alcott

 

I can't help detesting my relations. I suppose it comes from the fact that none of us can stand other people having the same faults as ourselves. ~~ Oscar Wilde

 

If all were gentle and contented as sheep, all would be as feeble and helpless. ~~ John Lancaster Spalding

 

Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries … of life … It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. ~~ Albert Einstein

 

You don't seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help. ~~ Jean Kerr

 

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us as the confident knowledge that they will help us. ~~ Epicurus

I haven't killed anybody all day. Help me keep it that way. ~~ Clint Eastwood

 

I think we must … quote whenever we feel that the allusion is interesting or helpful or amusing. ~~ Clifton Fadiman

 

This we learn from Watergate

That almost any creep'll

Be glad to help the Government

Overthrow the people. ~~ E. Y. Harburg

 

It is in fact a part of the function of education to help us to escape, not from our own time -- for we are bound by that -- but from the intellectual and emotional limitations of our time. ~~ T. S. Eliot

 

A child's business is an open yard, into which any passer-by may peer curiously. It is no house, not even a glass house. A child's reticence is a little white fence around her business, with a swinging, helpless gate through which grownups come in or go out, for there are no locks on your privacy. ~~ Margaret Lee Runbeck

 

The friend of my adversity I shall always cherish most. I can better trust those who helped to relieve the gloom of my dark hours than those who are so ready to enjoy with me the sunshine of my prosperity. ~~ Ulysses S. Grant

 

It is a very rare man who does not victimize the helpless. ~~ James Baldwin

 

All our knowledge merely helps us to die a more painful death than the animals that know nothing. ~~ Maurice Maeterlinck

 

The mother-child relationship is paradoxical and, in a sense, tragic. It requires the most intense love on the mother's side, yet this very love must help the child grow away from the mother and to become fully independent. ~~ Erich Fromm

 

Life's unfairness is not irrevocable; we can help balance the scales for others, if not always for ourselves. ~~ Hubert H. Humphrey

 

The world was once divided into those who used computers and those who did not. No more. The new world is divided into those who have watched helplessly as their computers have crashed and those who are waiting for it to happen. ~~ Stuart Crainer

 

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. ~~ George Santayana

 

Men are made stronger on realization that the helping hand they need is at the end of their own arm. ~~ Sidney J. Phil

 

It will help us and our children if we can laugh at our faults. It will help us tolerate our shortcomings and it will help our children see that the goal is to be human, not perfect. ~~ Neil Kurshan

 

The absent are like children, helpless to defend themselves. ~~ Charles Reade

 

My mother thought it would make us feel better to know animals had no souls and thus their deaths were not to be taken seriously. But it didn't help and when I think of some of the animals I've known, I wonder. The only really "soulful" eyes in the world belong to the dog or cat who sits on your lap or at your feet commiserating when you cry. ~~ Liz Smith

 

If my fellow citizens want to go to Hell I will help them. It is my job. ~~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

 

I can't help feeling wary when I hear anything said about the masses. First you take their faces from 'em, calling them the masses, and then you accuse 'em of not having any faces. ~~ J. B. Priestley

 

Necessity can set me helpless on my back, but she cannot keep me there; nor can four walls limit my vision. ~~ Margaret Fairless Barber

 

A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in trouble. ~~ Adlai Stevenson

 

I struggled in the beginning. I said I was going to write the truth, so help me God. And I thought I was. I found I couldn't. Nobody can write the absolute truth. ~~ Henry Miller

 

Appearances give us more pleasure than reality, especially when they help to satisfy our egos. ~~ Emile Chevalier

 

Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you don't help us, who else in the world can help us do this? ~~ Albert Camus

 

… in the West Indies … education drives the culture. That helps people resist feeling imprisoned by racism. They don't see the bars. They see the spaces between the bars. ~~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

 

I'd help the homeless. And I would be sure that everyone has a rose. ~~ Sixth-grader's essay

 

No one in this world, so far as I know -- and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me -- has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. ~~ H. L. Mencken

 

All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams. ~~ Elias Canetti [The Human Province]

 

God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters. ~~ H. L. Mencken

 

I am satisfied there is nothing to be done but to make the best of what cannot be helped, to act with reason oneself and with a good conscience. And though that will not give all the joys some people wish for, yet it will make one very quiet. ~~ Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough

 

You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. ~~ Abraham Lincoln

 

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and to help them to become what they are capable of being. ~~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 

Marrying for love may be a bit risky, but it is so honest that God can't help but smile on it. ~~ Josh Billings

 

Perhaps the purpose for which I was born is not to write about my life in search of some universal meaning that may help others to better understand their own lives -- which, in my more egomaniacal moments, is a mission I have embraced. ~~ Dean Koontz [Fear Nothing]

 

It's over, and can't be helped, and that's one consolation, as they always say in Turkey, when they cut the wrong man's head off. ~~ Charles Dickens

 

We helpers deserve to nurture ourselves as well as those we care for. Some caregivers think that to sacrifice and suffer is spiritual. I believe this might be called "spiritual anorexia." ~~ Caryn Summers, RN

 

The aim of the college, for the individual student, is to eliminate the need in his life for the college; the task is to help him become a self-educating man. ~~ C. Wright Mills

 

Many people now believe that if fathers are more interested in raising children than they were, children and sons in particular will learn that men can be warm and supportive of others as well as be high achievers. Thus, fathers' involvement may be beneficial not because it will help support traditional male roles, but because it will help to break them down. ~~ Joseph Pleck

 

Dear Lord: Help me seek the truth, but spare me the company of those who have found it. ~~ Unattributed

 

There is no lovelier way to thank God for your sight than by giving a helping hand to someone in the dark. ~~ Helen Keller

 

I couldn't help it. I can resist everything except temptation. ~~ Oscar Wilde

 

Sometimes the world seemed to come with subtitles, like a foreign film. So help her, sometimes people's hidden motives, their lies, their rationalizations, were so pitifully apparent that Sophia felt she could just sit and read them. ~~ Andrew Klaven [The Uncanny]

 

Of what help is anyone who can only be approached with the right words? ~~ Elizabeth Bibesco

 

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. ~~ Martin Luther King, Jr. (See Said Who?)

 

Where misunderstanding serves others as an advantage, one is helpless to make oneself understood. ~~ Lionel Trilling

 

Oh Lord, grant that we may not despise our rulers; and grant, oh Lord, that they may not act so we can't help it. ~~ Lyman Beecher

 

It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity. ~~ George Bernard Shaw

 

A good cry sometimes serves as an anodyne and slightly alleviates disappointment and pain. Anyway, it can't do you any harm and it may help a little. ~~ George Jean Nathan

 

Grief and pain are but the soil from which springs the lovely plant -- unselfishness. Be gentle and learn how to suffer … Whatever you can do to live bravely -- without impatience or repining -- will help you to live someday in a joyful contentment. ~~ Helen Keller

 

Ideas are like children -- no matter how much you admire someone else's, you can't help liking your own best. ~~ Unattributed

 

The only person who cannot be helped is that person who blames others. ~~ Carl Rogers

 

I know some good marriages -- marriages where both people are just trying to get through their days by helping each other, being good to each other. ~~ Erica Jong

 

I am often troubled as I try hard here to create a new sense of common purpose ... that sometimes we forget that we are all in this because we are seeking a good that helps all Americans. ~~ William Jefferson Clinton

 

The only thing some people do for themselves is feel sorry, and even then they like help. ~~ Joe Moore

 

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. ~~ Stephen King

 

What helps me to go forward is that I stay receptive, I feel that anything can happen. ~~ Anouk Aimee

 

Delusions help make life worth living. ~~ William C. Hunter

 

I may be a living legend, but that sure don't help when I've got to change a flat tire. ~~ Roy Orbison