The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.
SAMUEL SMILESAlexander 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.
More Samuel Smiles Quotes
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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.
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Biographies of great, but especially of good men are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels,–teaching high living ,high thinking, and energetic action, for their own and, the world’s good.
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Marriage like government is a series of compromises. One must give and take, repair and restrain, endure and be patient.
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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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The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, but he who is in the thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice.
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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.
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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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Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.
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The possession of a library, or the free use of it, no more constitutes learning, than the possession of wealth constitutes generosity.
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It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit of life.
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Men often discover their affinity to each other by the mutual love they have for a book.
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If we opened our minds to enjoyment, we might find tranquil pleasures spread about us on every side. We might live with the angels that visit us on every sunbeam, and sit with the fairies who wait on every flower.
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Those who aren’t making mistakes probably aren’t making anything.
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The great and good do no die even in this world. Embalmed in books, their spirits walk abroad. The book is a living voice. It is an intellect to which one still listens.
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Riches do not constitute any claim to distinction. It is only the vulgar who admire riches as riches.
SAMUEL SMILES