Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.

— 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

Politeness goes far yet costs nothing.

— Samuel Smiles

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.

— Samuel Smiles

The battle of life is, in most cases, fought uphill; and to win it without a struggle were perhaps to win it without honor. If there were no difficulties there would be no success; if there were nothing to struggle for, there would be nothing to be achieved.

— Samuel Smiles

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.

— Samuel Smiles

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

They who are the most persistent and work in the true spirit will invariably be the most successful.

— Samuel Smiles

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.

— Samuel Smiles

Whilst writing all this, I have had in my mind a woman, whose strong and serious mind would not have failed to support me in these contentions. I lost her thirty years ago [I was a child then]--nevertheless, ever living in my memory, she follows me from age to age. She suffered with me in my poverty, and was not allowed to share my better fortune. When young, I made her sad, and now I cannot console her. I know not even where her bones are: I was too poor then to buy earth to bury her! And yet I owe her much. I feel deeply that I am the son of woman. Every instant, in my ideas and words [not to mention my features and gestures], I find again my mother in myself. It is my mother's blood which gives me the sympathy I feel for bygone ages, and the tender remembrance of all those who are now no more. What return then could I, who am myself advancing towards old age, make her for the many things I owe her? One, for which she would have thanked me--this protest in favor of women and mothers.

— Samuel Smiles