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“That you must master the secret for yourselves lay implicit in our bargain, and you were never promised that a writer's training would be easy.”
Learning to write is presented as demanding practice rather than a shortcut: difficulty belongs to the training and does not by itself signal failure.
Source note: On the Art of Writing, Lecture XII, “On Style,” Project Gutenberg #17470; excerpted from Quiller-Couch’s reminder that students must master craft for themselves.
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“The worth of work with the hands”
Washington opens the book by treating manual work as capable of contributing to education, dignity and practical development rather than merely supplying labor.
Source note: Working With the Hands, Chapter I, opening sentence; Project Gutenberg #64504. This deliberately short excerpt is presented with its educational context.
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“If you would be a good reader, read; if a writer, write.”
Skill grows through repeated practice rather than through wanting the identity without doing the activity.
Source note: Discourses, in George Long’s translation; the line uses reading and writing as examples of habits built through practice.
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“Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?”
Ability has little practical value when it is permanently hidden; talent becomes useful through application and visibility.
Source note: Poor Richard’s Almanack.
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“All that is great in man comes of labour;—greatness in art, in literature, in science.”
Smiles presents major artistic, literary and scientific achievement as inseparable from labour, reflecting the book’s strong Victorian ethic of industry.
Source note: 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.
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“Labour and skill applied to the vulgarest things invest them at once with precious value.”
Skill can transform ordinary material through workmanship, connecting value not only with the object itself but with knowledgeable effort applied to it.
Source note: 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.