Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.
Samuel SmilesRead
The duty of helping one's self in the highest sense involves the helping of one's neighbors.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Helping oneself is inherently linked to helping others.
This quote suggests that true self-improvement is not a solitary endeavor but is connected to the well-being of others. When individuals focus on bettering themselves, they should also consider how their growth and actions can support and uplift their neighbors and community, indicating that personal success and collective responsibility are intertwined.
Themes
Self-HelpCommunitySupportNeighborsGrowthResponsibility
In practice
Example use cases
This quote is often shared during community service events to inspire volunteers.
More from Samuel Smiles
All quotes βHope is like the sun, which, as we journey toward it, casts the shadow of our burden behind us.
Samuel SmilesRead
The career of a great man remains an enduring monument of human energy. The man dies and disappears, but his thoughts and acts survive and leave an indelible stamp upon his race.
Samuel SmilesRead
Wisdom and understanding can only become the possession of individual men by travelling the old road of observation, attention, perseverance, and industry.
Samuel SmilesRead
An intense anticipation itself transforms possibility into reality; our desires being often but precursors of the things which we are capable of performing.
Samuel SmilesRead
If we opened our minds to enjoyment, we might find tranquil pleasures spread about us on every side. We might live with the angels that visit us on every sunbeam, and sit with the fairies who wait on every flower.
Samuel SmilesRead
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Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license," and they will define freedom out of existence.
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I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, 'It tastes sweet, does it not?' 'You've caught me,' grief answered, 'and you've ruined my business. How can I sell sorrow, when you know it's a blessing?
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Let us think of people as starting life with an experience they forget and ending it with one which they anticipate but cannot understand.
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In our day the feeling of patriotism is an unnatural, irrational, and harmful feeling, and a cause of a great part of the ills from which mankind is suffering, and that, consequently, this feeling - should not be cultivated, as is now being done, but should, on the contrary, be suppressed and eradicated by all means available to rational men.
Leo TolstoyRead
...she needed to confirm its presence. Like the keeper of the lighthouse and the prisoner, she regarded it as a mooring, a checkpoint, some stable visual object that assured her that the world was still there; that this was like and not a dream. That she was alive somewhere, inside, which she acknowledged to be true only because a thing she knew intimately was out there, outside of herself.
Toni MorrisonRead
Spirituality is not to be learned by flight from the world, or by running away from things, or by turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, we must learn an inner solitude wherever or with whomsoever we may be. We must learn to penetrate things and find God there.
Meister EckhartRead