Samuel Smiles

Any number of depraved units cannot form a great nation.

Samuel Smiles

Cheerfulness is also an excellent wearing quality. It has been called the bright weather of the heart.

Samuel Smiles

Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in afterlife the images first presented to it. The first thing continues forever with the child. The first joy, the first sorrow, the first success, the first failure, the first achievement, the first misadventure, paint the foreground of his life.

Samuel Smiles

Commit a child to the care of a worthless, ignorant woman, and no culture in after-life will remedy the evil you have done.

Samuel Smiles

Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one’s duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it; but the common lot of men is not heroic.

Samuel Smiles

Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.

Samuel Smiles

Courage is by no means incompatible with tenderness. On the contrary, gentleness and tenderness have been found to characterize the men, no less than the women, who have done the most courageous deeds.

Samuel Smiles

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.

Samuel Smiles

For want of self-restraint many men are engaged all their lives in fighting with difficulties of their own making.

Samuel Smiles

Good sense, disciplined by experience and inspired by goodness, issues in practical wisdom.

Samuel Smiles