Top 100 Samuel Smiles Quotes
#1. The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.
Samuel Smiles
#2. The healthy spirit of self-help created among working people would, more than any other measure, serve to raise them as a class; and this, not by pulling down others, but by levelling them up to a higher and still advancing standard of religion, intelligence, and virtue.
Samuel Smiles
#3. One might almost fear," writes a thoughtful woman, "seeing how the women of to-day are lightly stirred up to run after some new fashion or faith, that heaven is not so near to them as it was to their mothers and grandmothers.
Samuel Smiles
#4. The cheapest of all things is kindness, its exercise requiring the least possible trouble and self-sacrifice. Win hearts, said Burleigh to Queen Elizabeth, and you have all men's hearts and purses.
Samuel Smiles
#5. Diligence, above all, is the mother of good luck.
Samuel Smiles
#7. Man cannot aspire if he looked down; if he rise, he must look up.
Samuel Smiles
#8. National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.
Samuel Smiles
#9. Necessity, oftener than facility, has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all has been the school of difficulty.
Samuel Smiles
#10. If we opened our minds to enjoyment, we might find tranquil pleasures spread about us on every side. We might live with the angels that visit us on every sunbeam, and sit with the fairies who wait on every flower.
Samuel Smiles
#11. Commit a child to the care of a worthless, ignorant woman, and no culture in after-life will remedy the evil you have done.
Samuel Smiles
#12. Life will always be to a large extent what we ourselves make it.
Samuel Smiles
#13. Good character is property. It is the noblest of all possessions.
Samuel Smiles
#14. Experience serves to prove that the worth and strength of a state depend far less upon the form of its institutions than upon the character of its men; for the nation is only the aggregate of individual conditions, and civilization itself is but a question of personal, improvement.
Samuel Smiles
#15. Home is the first and most important school of character. It is there that every human being receives his best moral training, or his worst; for it is there that he imbibes those principles of conduct which endure through manhood, and cease only with life.
Samuel Smiles
#16. Men cannot be raised in masses as the mountains were in he early geological states of the world. They must be dealt with as units; for it is only by the elevation of individuals that the elevation of the masses can be effectively secured.
Samuel Smiles
#17. A fig-tree looking on a fig-tree becometh fruitful, says the Arabian proverb. And so it is with children; their first great instructor is example.
Samuel Smiles
#18. The noble people will be nobly ruled, and the ignorant and corrupt ignobly.
Samuel Smiles
#19. All that is great in man comes through work; and civilization is its product.
Samuel Smiles
#20. Great men stamp their mind upon their age and nation.
Samuel Smiles
#21. The career of a great man remains an enduring monument of human energy. The man dies and disappears, but his thoughts and acts survive and leave an indelible stamp upon his race.
Samuel Smiles
#22. The great high-road of human welfare lies along the old highway of steadfast, well-doing; and they who are the most persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will invariably be the most successful; success treads on the heels of every right effort.
Samuel Smiles
#23. Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.
Samuel Smiles
#24. Although genius always commands admiration, character most secures respect. The former is more the product of the brain, the latter of heart-power; and in the long run it is the heart that rules in life.
Samuel Smiles
#25. It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.
Samuel Smiles
#26. Alexander the Great valued learning so highly, that he used to say he was more indebted to Aristotle for giving him knowledge than to his father Philip for life.
Samuel Smiles
#27. The most influential of all the virtues are those which are the most in request for daily use. They wear the best, and last the longest.
Samuel Smiles
#28. Liberty is the result of free individual action,energy and independence.
Samuel Smiles
#29. The best school of discipline is home. Family life is God's own method of training the young, and homes are very much as women make them.
Samuel Smiles
#30. No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
Samuel Smiles
#31. Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.
Samuel Smiles
#32. The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others.
Samuel Smiles
#33. Stothard learned the art of combining colors by closely studying butterflies wings; he would often say that no one knew what he owed to these tiny insects. A burnt stick and a barn door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and canvas.
Samuel Smiles
#34. Work is one of the best educators of practical character.
Samuel Smiles
#35. Example teaches better than precept. It is the best modeler of the character of men and women. To set a lofty example is the richest bequest a man can leave behind him.
Samuel Smiles
#36. Energy enables a man to force his way through irksome drudgery and dry details and caries him onward and upward to every station in life.
Samuel Smiles
#37. Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.
Samuel Smiles
#39. Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels,
teaching high living ,high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and, the world's good.
Samuel Smiles
#40. Men who are resolved to find a way for themselves will always find opportunities enough; and if they do not find them, they will make them.
Samuel Smiles
#41. The very greatest things - great thoughts, discoveries, inventions - have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.
Samuel Smiles
#42. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.
Samuel Smiles
#44. Luck lies in bed, and wishes the postman would bring him news of a legacy; labor turns out at six, and with busy pen or ringing hammer lays the foundation of a competence.
Samuel Smiles
#45. The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.
Samuel Smiles
#46. True politeness is consideration for the opinions of others. It has been said of dogmatism that it is only puppyism come to its full growth; and certainly the worst form this quality can assume is that of opinionativeness and arrogance.
Samuel Smiles
#47. Great men are always exceptional men; and greatness itself is but comparative. Indeed, the range of most men in life is so limited that very few have the opportunity of being great.
Samuel Smiles
#48. A man may be accomplished in art, literature, and science, and yet, in honesty, virtue, truthfulness, and the spirit of duty, be entitled to take rank after many a poor and illiterate peasant.
Samuel Smiles
#49. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.
Samuel Smiles
#50. There are many counterfeits of character, but the genuine article is difficult to be mistaken.
Samuel Smiles
#51. Make good thy standing place, and move the world.
Samuel Smiles
#52. Honorable industry always travels the same road with enjoyment and duty, and progress is altogether impossible without it.
Samuel Smiles
#53. Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.
Samuel Smiles
#54. It is not ease, but effort-not facility, but difficulty, makes men. There is, perhaps, no station in life in which difficulties have not to be encountered and overcome before any decided measure of success can be achieved.
Samuel Smiles
#55. Cheerfulness is also an excellent wearing quality. It has been called the bright weather of the heart.
Samuel Smiles
#56. The best-regulated home is always that in which the discipline is the most perfect, and yet where it is the least felt. Moral discipline acts with the force of a law of nature.
Samuel Smiles
#57. There is far too much croaking among young men.
Samuel Smiles
#59. Success treads on the heels of every right effort; and though it is possible to overestimate success to the extent of almost deifying it, as is sometimes done, still in any worthy pursuit it is meritorious.
Samuel Smiles
#60. Riches are oftener an impediment than a stimulus to action; and in many cases they are quite as much a misfortune as a blessing.
Samuel Smiles
#61. The women of the poorer classes make sacrifices, and run risks, and bear privations, and exercise patience and kindness to a degree that the world never knows of, and would scarcely believe even if it did know.
Samuel Smiles
#62. Sow a thought, and you reap an act;
Sow an act, and you reap a habit;
Sow a habit, and you reap a character;
Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
Samuel Smiles
#63. Self-respect is the noblest garment with which a man can clothe himself, the most elevating feeling with which the mind can be inspired.
Samuel Smiles
#64. Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in afterlife the images first presented to it. The first thing continues forever with the child. The first joy, the first sorrow, the first success, the first failure, the first achievement, the first misadventure, paint the foreground of his life.
Samuel Smiles
#65. The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.
Samuel Smiles
#66. Sow a thought and you get an act; Sow an act and you get a habit; Sow a habit and you get a character; Sow a character and you get a destiny.
Samuel Smiles
#67. The possession of a library, or the free use of it, no more constitutes learning, than the possession of wealth constitutes generosity.
Samuel Smiles
#68. Purposes, like eggs, unless they be hatched into action, will run into rottenness.
Samuel Smiles
#69. The brave man is an inspiration to the weak, and compels them, as it were, to follow him.
Samuel Smiles
#70. Those who aren't making mistakes probably aren't making anything.
Samuel Smiles
#71. The Romans rightly employed the same word (virtus) to designate courage, which is, in a physical sense, what the other is in a moral; the highest virtue of all being victory over ourselves.
Samuel Smiles
#72. When typhus or cholera breaks out, they tell us that Nobody is to blame. That terrible Nobody! How much he has to answer for. More mischief is done by Nobody than by all the world besides.
Samuel Smiles
#73. Self-control is only courage under another form.
Samuel Smiles
#74. Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one's duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it; but the common lot of men is not heroic.
Samuel Smiles
#75. It will generally be found that men who are constantly lamenting their ill luck are only reaping the consequences of their own neglect, mismanagement, and improvidence, or want of application.
Samuel Smiles
#76. The work of many of the greatest men, inspired by duty, has been done amidst suffering and trial and difficulty. They have struggled against the tide, and reached the shore exhausted.
Samuel Smiles
#77. The influence of woman is the same everywhere. Her condition influences the morals, manners, and character of the people of all countries. Where she is debased, society is debased; where she is morally pure and enlightened, society will be proportionately elevated.
Samuel Smiles
#78. The battle of life is, in most cases, fought uphill; and to win it without a struggle were perhaps to win it without honor. If there were no difficulties there would be no success; if there were nothing to struggle for, there would be nothing to be achieved.
Samuel Smiles
#79. Length of years is no proper test of length of life. A man's life is to be measured by what he does in it and what he feels in it.
Samuel Smiles
#80. Progress, of the best kind, is comparatively slow. Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step.
Samuel Smiles
#81. The reason why so little is done, is generally because so little is attempted.
Samuel Smiles
#82. This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.
Samuel Smiles
#83. To set a lofty example is the richest bequest a man can leave behind.
Samuel Smiles
#84. Hope is the companion of power, and mother of success; for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles.
Samuel Smiles
#85. The tiniest bits of opinion sown in the minds of children in private life afterwards issue forth to the world, and become its public opinion; for nations are gathered out of nurseries.
Samuel Smiles
#86. Riches do not constitute any claim to distinction. It is only the vulgar who admire riches as riches.
Samuel Smiles
#87. Those who are the most persistent, and work in the true spirit, will invariably be the most successful.
Samuel Smiles
#88. Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.
Samuel Smiles
#89. The experience gathered from books, though often valuable,is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life is of the nature of wisdom
Samuel Smiles
#90. It is observed at sea that men are never so much disposed to grumble and mutiny as when least employed. Hence an old captain, when there was nothing else to do, would issue the order to scour the anchor.
Samuel Smiles
#91. Woman, above all other educators, educates humanly. Man is the brain, but woman is the heart, of humanity.
Samuel Smiles
#92. Fortune has often been blamed for her blindness; but fortune is not so blind as men are. Those who look into practical life will find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and waves are on the side of the best navigators.
Samuel Smiles
#93. I see nothing quite conclusive in the art of temporal government, But violence, duplicity and frequent malversation. King rules or barons rule: The strong man strongly and the weak man by caprice. They have but one law, to seize the power and keep it.
Samuel Smiles
#94. Enthusiasm ... the sustaining power of all great action.
Samuel Smiles
#95. Labor is still, and ever will be, the inevitable price set upon everything which is valuable.
Samuel Smiles
#96. All experiences of life seems to prove that the impediments thrown in the way of the human advancement may for the most part be overcome by steady good conduct, honest zeal, activity, perseverance and above all, by a determined resolution to surmount.
Samuel Smiles
#98. The apprenticeship of difficulty is one which the greatest of men have had to serve.
Samuel Smiles
#99. A place for everything and everything in its place
Samuel Smiles
#100. All life is a struggle ... Under competition the lazy man is put under the necessity of exerting himself; and if he will not exert himself, he must fall behind. If he do not work, neither shall he eat.
Samuel Smiles
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