The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.
SAMUEL SMILESA 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.
More Samuel Smiles Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Enthusiasm, the sustaining power of all great action.
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No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
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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.
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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.
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Luck whines; labor whistles.
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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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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.
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Life will always be to a large extent what we ourselves make it.
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The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.
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Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.
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Character is undergoing constant change, for better or for worse–either being elevated on the one hand, or degraded on the other.
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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.
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