Samuel Smiles Quotes
Top 89 wise famous quotes and sayings by Samuel Smiles
Samuel Smiles Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Samuel Smiles on Wise Famous Quotes.
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.
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.
Labour may be a burden and a chastisement, but it is also an honour and a glory. Without it, nothing can be accomplished.
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.
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.
The great leader attracts to himself men of kindred character, drawing them towards him as the loadstone draws iron.
Self-respect is the noblest garment with which a man can clothe himself, the most elevating feeling with which the mind can be inspired.
Commit a child to the care of a worthless, ignorant woman, and no culture in after-life will remedy the evil you have done.
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.
The life of a good man is at the same time the most eloquent lesson of virtue and the most severe reproof of vice.
No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
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.
Necessity, oftener than facility, has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all has been the school of difficulty.
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.
Honorable industry always travels the same road with enjoyment and duty, and progress is altogether impossible without it.
Admiration of great men, living or dead, naturally evokes imitation of them in a greater or less degree.
Cheerfulness is also an excellent wearing quality. It has been called the bright weather of the heart.
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.
National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.
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.
Those who are the most persistent, and work in the true spirit, will invariably be the most successful.
Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.
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.
The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.
Time is of no account with great thoughts. They are as fresh today as when they first passed through their author's minds, ages ago.
Hope ... is the companion of power, and the mother of success; for who so hopes has within him the gift of miracles.
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.
Men whose acts are at variance with their words command no respect, and what they say has but little weight.
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.
Riches do not constitute any claim to distinction. It is only the vulgar who admire riches as riches.
Persons with comparatively moderate powers will accomplish much, if they apply themselves wholly and indefatigably to one thing at a time.
Marriage like government is a series of compromises. One must give and take, repair and restrain, endure and be patient.
Woman, above all other educators, educates humanly. Man is the brain, but woman is the heart, of humanity.
Character is undergoing constant change, for better or for worse
either being elevated on the one hand, or degraded on the other.
either being elevated on the one hand, or degraded on the other.
Riches are oftener an impediment than a stimulus to action; and in many cases they are quite as much a misfortune as a blessing.
This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.