Source identified
Read & copy the quotation
“Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates.”
- Source
- Self-Help
- Date
- 1859
Meaning of “Help from without is often enfeebling in its…”
Smiles contrasts external direction with cultivated internal agency, arguing in his nineteenth-century self-help framework that people become stronger by exercising their own capacities rather than depending entirely on outside support.
Where does it come from?
Self-Help, Chapter I, “Self-Help—National and Individual,” Project Gutenberg #935. The sentence immediately follows Smiles’s statement that the spirit of self-help is the root of individual growth. It is preserved as Victorian conduct-of-life rhetoric, not as evidence that receiving help is generally harmful.
