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 SMILESCheerfulness is also an excellent wearing quality. It has been called the bright weather of the heart.
More Samuel Smiles Quotes
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Opportunities fall in the way of every man who is resolved to take advantage of them.
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For want of self-restraint many men are engaged all their lives in fighting with difficulties of their own making.
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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.
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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.
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The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.
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Life will always be to a large extent what we ourselves make it.
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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.
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Make good thy standing place, and move the world.
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Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in after life the images first presented to it.
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Those who aren’t making mistakes probably aren’t making anything.
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Character is itself a fortune.
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Great men stamp their mind upon their age and nation.
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Cecil’s dispatch of business was extraordinary, his maxim being, “The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.”
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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.
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Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.
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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.
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Good sense, disciplined by experience and inspired by goodness, issues in practical wisdom.
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Self-control is only courage under another form. It may also be regarded as the primary essence of character.
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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.
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Even happiness itself may become habitual. There is a habit of looking at the bright side of things, and also of looking at the dark side.
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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.
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National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.
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The truest politeness comes of sincerity.
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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.
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He who labours not, cannot enjoy the reward of labour.
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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.
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