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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.

Samuel Smiles

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Samuel Smiles
Age: 91 †
Born: 1812
Born: December 23
Died: 1904
Died: April 16
Author
Biographer
Journalist
Philosopher
Writer
Haddington
East Lothian
School
Useful
Without
Remain
Real
Discipline
Life
Theory
Learned
Precepts
Wisdom
Instruction
Experience
Practicals
Nature
Practical

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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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It is energy - the central element of which is will - that produces the miracle that is enthusiasm in all ages. Everywhere it is what is called force of character and the sustaining power of all great action
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Nothing is more common than energy in money-making, quite independent of any higher object than its accumulation. A man who devotes himself to this pursuit, body and soul, can scarcely fail to become rich. Very little brains will do spend less than you earn add guinea to guinea scrape and save and the pile of gold will gradually rise.
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Good character is property. It is the noblest of all possessions.
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Life will always be to a large extent what we ourselves make it.
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Woman is the heart of humanity ... its grace, ornament, and solace.
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One might almost fear, writes a thoughtful woman, seeing how the women of to-day are lightly stirred up to run after some new fashion or faith, that heaven is not so near to them as it was to their mothers and grandmothers.
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The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.
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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.
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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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The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.
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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.
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No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober.
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Stothard learned the art of combining colors by closely studying butterflies wings he would often say that no one knew what he owed to these tiny insects. A burnt stick and a barn door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and canvas.
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Cheerfulness is also an excellent wearing quality. It has been called the bright weather of the heart.
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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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A fig-tree looking on a fig-tree becometh fruitful, says the Arabian proverb. And so it is with children their first great instructor is example.
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The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others.
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Commit a child to the care of a worthless, ignorant woman, and no culture in after-life will remedy the evil you have done.
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If character be irrecoverably lost, then indeed there will be nothing left worth saving.
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