The great leader attracts to himself men of kindred character, drawing them towards him as the loadstone draws iron.
SAMUEL SMILESIt 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.
More Samuel Smiles Quotes
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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.
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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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Life is of little value unless it be consecrated by duty.
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The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.
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To set a lofty example is the richest bequest a man can leave behind.
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This extraordinary metal, the soul of every manufacture, and the mainspring perhaps of civilised society. Of iron.
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The cheapest of all things is kindness, its exercise requiring the least possible trouble and self-sacrifice. Win hearts, said Burleigh to Queen Elizabeth, and you have all men’s hearts and purses.
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Work is one of the best educators of practical character.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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Although genius always commands admiration, character most secures respect. The former is more the product of the brain, the latter of heart-power; and in the long run it is the heart that rules in life.
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