Samuel Smiles Quotes About Service

Character, Chapter I, “Influence of Character,” Project Gutenberg #2541. In the chapter’s discussion of duty in ordinary life, Smiles argues that the virtues most needed in everyday conduct exert the widest and most lasting influence.

Thrift, Preface; original Preface dated London, November 1875, verified in Project Gutenberg #14418’s represented John Murray Fiftieth Thousand witness (London, 1892). “The essence of generosity is self-sacrifice” immediately follows Smiles’s claim that justice and generosity require self-denial. This collection preserves the Victorian ethical argument rather than treating the maxim as a complete modern definition of generosity.

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 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. 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 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.