Samuel Smiles Quotes About Hard Work

Self-Help, Chapter XI, “Self-Culture—Facilities and Difficulties,” Project Gutenberg #935. The passage comes immediately after Hodson’s reflection on resolutely doing difficult duties and continues by presenting difficulty as a stimulus to people of resolution and valour.

Self-Help, Chapter IX, “Men of Business,” Project Gutenberg #935. The sentence appears in Smiles’s discussion of method, punctuality and the economical use of time, contrasting losses that may be repaired with time once spent, which cannot be recovered.

Thrift, Chapter IV, “Means of Saving,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Smiles is arguing that working people should reject the idea that labour is degrading and use leisure for cultivation; the surrounding passage contains period class judgments that are not adopted as present-day social evidence.

Thrift, Chapter XIV, “Riches and Charity,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Smiles argues that money alone cannot reform conduct and says change from intemperance, improvidence and irreligion requires earnest purpose, self-devotion and hard work; that nineteenth-century reform context is preserved.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Smiles broadens his defence of labour from material production to art, literature, science and knowledge; the universal wording is his historical moral claim, not an empirical rule that effort alone guarantees greatness.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. The “they” refers to earlier generations whose tools, fabrics, art and science are presented as an inherited store of useful labour in Smiles’s historical account.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Smiles moves from mutual dependence among workers to the value added by labour and skill; “vulgarest” preserves the period wording for common or ordinary things.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. The phrase completes Smiles’s account of practical knowledge passing from one generation to another through teaching and example, preserving art, handicraft, tools and materials.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Immediately after linking greatness in art, literature and science with labour, Smiles rhetorically defines genius as a capacity for intense and sustained effort; it is not treated as a modern psychological finding.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Smiles uses inherited labour, tools and accumulated skill to explain his nineteenth-century account of civilization; the passage is retained as historical social thought rather than current anthropology.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. The sentence immediately follows the poetry example and presents substantial work as the product of repeated effort and failure; the absolute wording is Smiles’s rhetorical generalization.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Smiles describes labour as cooperation with nature and personifies nature as supplying the conditions under which human work produces food and materials; it is not a scientific account of agriculture.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. The sentence follows Smiles’s claim that useful and beautiful thoughts arise from sustained intellectual work and uses poetry as one example of painstaking creative labour.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Smiles contrasts inherited material wealth with the more durable inheritance of useful human skill and labour transmitted across generations by teaching and example.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. Smiles applies the chapter’s labour argument to intellectual and creative production, listing study, observation, research and diligent elaboration as the work behind useful and beautiful thought.

Thrift, Chapter I, “Industry,” Project Gutenberg #14418. The sentence follows Smiles’s description of cooperation with nature and argues that food, clothing and shelter all depend on labour; it is a broad moral-economic claim, not a complete production model.