Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Armour

Armour’s line lands like a clean little paradox, the kind a poet-comedian might slip into a dinner conversation just to watch everyone pause with a fork midair. “Help yourself” is the polite, buffet-table benediction of abundance: take what you want, take what you deserve, take more. Armour flips the phrase by adding “less,” revealing how easily that cultural script curdles into self-sabotage. The wit works because it exploits an idiom we associate with agency and hospitality, then exposes how “agency” in eating often gets hijacked by impulse, stress, and social permission.

The intent isn’t puritanical deprivation; it’s self-management disguised as manners. “Sometimes” is doing quiet heavy lifting here, resisting the absolutism of diet culture before diet culture had a name. Armour suggests that restraint can be a form of care, not punishment - a small recalibration away from the mythology that more choice equals more freedom. In a consumer society built on supersizing, the joke is that the quickest way to “help yourself” is to stop treating appetite like an emergency.

Context matters: Armour wrote in an era when American plenty became a postwar identity, with convenience foods and celebratory overeating as patriotic normalcy. By couching discipline in a familiar social phrase, he sidesteps moralizing and makes moderation feel like common sense rather than a sermon. The subtext: real self-help is often subtraction, not addition, and the hardest “less” is the one offered freely to yourself.