Samuel Smiles

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• England was nothing, compared to continental nations until she had become commercial…until about the middle of the last century, when a number of ingenious and inventive men, without apparent relation to each other, arose in various parts of the kingdom, succeeded in giving an immense impulse to all the branches of the national industry; the result of which has been a harvest of wealth and prosperity, perhaps without a parallel in the history of the world.
  • Lives of the Engineers (1862)

• A place for everything, and everything in its place.
  • Thrift (1875)

• Sow a thought, and you reap an act;
  Sow an act, and you reap a habit;
  Sow a habit, and you reap a character;
  Sow a character, and you reap a destiny.
  • anonymous, quoted in Life and Labor (1887)

Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859)

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

• "Heaven helps those who help themselves" is a well tired maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of a vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength.
  • variant: God helps them who help themselves, proverb recorded in George Herbert's Jacula Prudentum (1651)

• We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

• We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

• A man who devotes himself to this pursuit, body and soul, can scarcely fail to become rich. Very little brains will do…

About Smiles

• Every now and then they were awarded prizes - Self-Help by Smiles, and other books suitable for perusal by persons suffering from almost complete obliteration of the mental faculties.
  • Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (Penguin, 2004), pp. 572-73.

• It's a brutal book; it ought to be burnt by the common hangman. Smiles was the arch-Philistine, and his book the apotheosis of respectability, gigmanity, and selfish grab.
  • An unnamed English labor leader quoted by Robert Blatchford in Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale Nota Bene, 2002), p. 68.