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Make good thy standing place, and move the world.

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
Make
Good
World
Standing
Move
Moving
Place

More quotes by Samuel Smiles

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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.
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All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. But all play and no work makes him something worse.
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I see nothing quite conclusive in the art of temporal government, But violence, duplicity and frequent malversation. King rules or barons rule: The strong man strongly and the weak man by caprice. They have but one law, to seize the power and keep it.
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Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.
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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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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.
Samuel Smiles
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Where there is a will there is a way is an old true saying. He who resolves upon doing a thing, by that very resolution often scales the barriers to it and secures its achievement. To think we are able is almost to be so - to determine upon attainment is frequently attainment itself.
Samuel Smiles
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It is not ease, but effort-not facility, but difficulty, makes men. There is, perhaps, no station in life in which difficulties have not to be encountered and overcome before any decided measure of success can be achieved.
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The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.
Samuel Smiles
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So much does the moral health depend upon the moral atmosphere that is breathed, and so great is the influence daily exercised by parents over their children by living a life before their eyes, that perhaps the best system of parental instruction might be summed up in these two words: 'Improve thyself.'
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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.
Samuel Smiles
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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.
Samuel Smiles
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Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession -a property entirely our own.
Samuel Smiles
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When typhus or cholera breaks out, they tell us that Nobody is to blame. That terrible Nobody! How much he has to answer for. More mischief is done by Nobody than by all the world besides.
Samuel Smiles
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The very greatest things - great thoughts, discoveries, inventions - have usually been nurtured in hardship, often pondered over in sorrow, and at length established with difficulty.
Samuel Smiles
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The egotist is next door to a fanatic.
Samuel Smiles
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Alexander the Great valued learning so highly, that he used to say he was more indebted to Aristotle for giving him knowledge than to his father Philip for life.
Samuel Smiles
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The noble people will be nobly ruled, and the ignorant and corrupt ignobly.
Samuel Smiles
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Energy of will may be defined to be the very central power of character in a man.
Samuel Smiles
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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.
Samuel Smiles