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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.

Samuel Smiles

The apprenticeship of difficulty is one which the greatest of men have had to serve.
SAMUEL SMILES

Difficult Greatness Man Service
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

Children Greatness Instruction
Character is undergoing constant change, for better or for worse–either being elevated on the one hand, or degraded on the other.
SAMUEL SMILES

Better Character Charge Hands Worst
Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only.
SAMUEL SMILES

Discipline Instruction Life Nature Practice Reality Theory Wisdom
This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.
SAMUEL SMILES

Civilization Manufacture Metal Soul
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

Competition Eat Himself Life Necessary Struggle Work
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

Accomplishment Burden Glory Hard Work Honor
Good sense, disciplined by experience and inspired by goodness, issues in practical wisdom.
SAMUEL SMILES

Discipline Experience Goodness Sense Wisdom
Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.
SAMUEL SMILES

Attention Industry Man Old Perseverance Possession Travel Understand Wisdom
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

Faith Fashion Grandmother Mother
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

Condition Experience Form Improvement Institution Personal Question Service
No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
SAMUEL SMILES

Drink Industry Law Sober
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

Believe Patience Poor Sacrifice Woman World
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

Father Knowledge Learning Life Value
No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights.
SAMUEL SMILES

Affect Better Economy Greatness Industry Law Right
Good character is property. It is the noblest of all possessions.
SAMUEL SMILES

Character Goodness Noble Possession Property

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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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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Popular Authors

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