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 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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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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Opportunities fall in the way of every man who is resolved to take advantage of them.
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Work is one of the best educators of practical character.
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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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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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The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.
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Necessity, oftener than facility, has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all has been the school of difficulty.
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The great high-road of human welfare lies along the old highway of steadfast welldoing; and they who are the most persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will invariably be the most successful.
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Woman, above all other educators, educates humanly. Man is the brain, but woman is the heart, of humanity.
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Character is itself a fortune.
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Those who aren’t making mistakes probably aren’t making anything.
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Obedience, submission, discipline, courage–these are among the characteristics which make a man.
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There is no act, however trivial, but has its train of consequences.
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No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
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Man cannot aspire if he looked down; if he rise, he must look up.
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