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Riches are oftener an impediment than a stimulus to action; and in many cases they are quite as much a misfortune as a blessing.

— Samuel Smiles

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More quotes by Samuel Smiles

We learn wisdom from failure much more than from success. We often discover what will do, by finding out what will not do; and probably he who never made a mistake never made a discovery.

Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859)

A place for everything, and everything in its place.

Thrift (1875)

"Heaven helps those who help themselves" is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience.

Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct (1859)

Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.

Samuel Smiles and the Victorian Work Ethic (1987)

Conscience is that peculiar faculty of the soul which may be called the religious instinct.

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Men accept servility in order to acquire wealth; as if they could acquire anything of their own when they cannot even assert that they belong to themselves.

Étienne de La Boétie Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1548)

Health is the greatest gift, contentment is the greatest wealth, a trusted friend is the best relative, Nibbana is the greatest bliss.

Gautama Buddha

Opulence is always the result of theft, if not committed by the actual possessor, then by his predecessor.

Jerome The Cry for Justice (1915)

Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes the dissimilar comparable by reducing it to abstract quantities. To the Enlightenment, that which does not reduce to numbers, and ultimately to the one, becomes illusion.

Max Horkheimer Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Samuel Smiles (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.