Top 100 Samuel Smiles Quotes
#2. Make good thy standing place, and move the world.
Samuel Smiles
#3. Idleness of the mind is much worse than that of the body: wit, without employment, is a disease - the rust of the soul, a plague, a hell itself.
Samuel Smiles
#4. There are many counterfeits of character, but the genuine article is difficult to be mistaken.
Samuel Smiles
#5. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.
Samuel Smiles
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.
Samuel Smiles
#10. Those who have most to do, and are willing to work, will find the most time.
Samuel Smiles
#11. 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
#12. Men must necessarily be the active agents of their own well-being and well-doing they themselves must in the very nature of things be their own best helpers.
Samuel Smiles
#13. The iron rail proved a magicians' road. It virtually reduced England to a sixth of its size. It brought the country nearer to the town and the town to the country ... It energized punctuality, discipline, and attention; and proved a moral teacher by the influence of example.
Samuel Smiles
#14. Honorable industry always travels the same road with enjoyment and duty, and progress is altogether impossible without it.
Samuel Smiles
#15. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.
Samuel Smiles
#16. 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
#17. If character be irrecoverably lost, then indeed there will be nothing left worth saving.
Samuel Smiles
#18. 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
#19. 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
#21. It is idleness that is the curse of man - not labour. Idleness eats the heart out of men as of nations, and consumes them as rust does iron.
Samuel Smiles
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. Work is one of the best educators of practical character.
Samuel Smiles
#26. 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
#27. The possession of a library, or the free use of it, no more constitutes learning, than the possession of wealth constitutes generosity.
Samuel Smiles
#28. 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
#29. Though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him; but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture.
Samuel Smiles
#30. The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.
Samuel Smiles
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. Courage is by no means incompatible with tenderness. On the contrary, gentleness and tenderness have been found to characterize the men, no less than the women, who have done the most courageous deeds.
Samuel Smiles
#34. There are many persons of whom it may be said that they have no other possession in the world but their character, and yet they stand as firmly upon it as any crowned king.
Samuel Smiles
#35. He who labours not, cannot enjoy the reward of labour.
Samuel Smiles
#36. Admiration of great men, living or dead, naturally evokes imitation of them in a greater or less degree.
Samuel Smiles
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Simple honesty of purpose in a man goes a long way in life, if founded on a just estimate of himself and a steady obedience to the rule he knows and feels to be right.
Samuel Smiles
#40. Furthermore, the slaves cannot be put into a more wretched situation, ourselves being judges, and the community cannot take a more lively step to escape ruin, and obtain the smiles and protection of Heaven.
Samuel Hopkins
#41. 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
#42. The highest culture is not obtained from the teacher when at school or college, so much as by our ever diligent self-education when we become men.
Samuel Smiles
#43. Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession - a property entirely our own.
Samuel Smiles
#45. There is far too much croaking among young men.
Samuel Smiles
#46. 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
#47. Cheerfulness is also an excellent wearing quality. It has been called the bright weather of the heart.
Samuel Smiles
#48. 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
#49. Like men, nations are purified and strengthened by trials.
Samuel Smiles
#50. Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.
Samuel Smiles
#51. National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.
Samuel Smiles
#52. 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
#53. Good character is property. It is the noblest of all possessions.
Samuel Smiles
#55. Men often discover their affinity to each other by the mutual love they have for a book.
Samuel Smiles
#56. Life will always be to a large extent what we ourselves make it.
Samuel Smiles
#57. The duty of helping one's self in the highest sense involves the helping of one's neighbors.
Samuel Smiles
#58. A woman's best qualities do not reside in her intellect, but in her affections. She gives refreshment by her sympathies, rather than by her knowledge.
Samuel Smiles
#59. We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery
Samuel Smiles
#60. 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
#61. Any number of depraved units cannot form a great nation.
Samuel Smiles
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. Energy of will may be defined to be the very central power of character in a man.
Samuel Smiles
#65. Man cannot aspire if he looked down; if he rise, he must look up.
Samuel Smiles
#67. Diligence, above all, is the mother of good luck.
Samuel Smiles
#68. The great leader attracts to himself men of kindred character, drawing them towards him as the loadstone draws iron.
Samuel Smiles
#69. 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
#70. Sympathy is the golden key that unlocks the hearts of others.
Samuel Smiles
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Labour may be a burden and a chastisement, but it is also an honour and a glory. Without it, nothing can be accomplished.
Samuel Smiles
#74. There is no act, however trivial, but has its train of consequences.
Samuel Smiles
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.
Samuel Smiles
#80. No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
Samuel Smiles
#81. 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
#82. Liberty is the result of free individual action,energy and independence.
Samuel Smiles
#83. The government of a nation itself is usually found to be but the reflux of the individuals composing it. The government that is ahead of the people will be inevitably dragged down to their level, as the government that is behind them will in the long run be dragged up.
Samuel Smiles
#84. 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
#85. Character is undergoing constant change, for better or for worse
either being elevated on the one hand, or degraded on the other.
Samuel Smiles
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Life is of little value unless it be consecrated by duty.
Samuel Smiles
#89. The knowledge and experience which produce wisdom can only become a man's individual possession and property by his own free action; and it is as futile to expect these without laborious, painstaking effort, as it is to hope to gather a harvest where the seed has not been sown.
Samuel Smiles
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. Hope ... is the companion of power, and the mother of success; for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles.
Samuel Smiles
#94. Great men stamp their mind upon their age and nation.
Samuel Smiles
#95. All that is great in man comes through work; and civilization is its product.
Samuel Smiles
#96. The noble people will be nobly ruled, and the ignorant and corrupt ignobly.
Samuel Smiles
#97. Woman is the heart of humanity ... its grace, ornament, and solace.
Samuel Smiles
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
