Samuel Smiles

Marriage like government is a series of compromises. One must give and take, repair and restrain, endure and be patient.

Samuel Smiles

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.

Samuel Smiles

Men often discover their affinity to each other by the mutual love they have for a book.

Samuel Smiles

Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.

Samuel Smiles

National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.

Samuel Smiles

No good thing is ever lost. Nothing dies, not even life which gives up one form only to resume another. No good action, no good example dies. It lives forever in our race. While the frame moulders and disappears, the deed leaves an indelible stamp, and molds the very thought and will of future generations.

Samuel Smiles

No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.

Samuel Smiles

Purposes, like eggs, unless they be hatched into action, will run into rottenness.

Samuel Smiles

Riches do not constitute any claim to distinction. It is only the vulgar who admire riches as riches.

Samuel Smiles

Simple honesty of purpose in a man goes a long way in life, if founded on a just estimate of himself and a steady obedience to the rule he knows and feels to be right.

Samuel Smiles