~Self-reliance.~--The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigor and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done _for_ men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.--_Samuel Smiles._
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. I love thee to the level of everyday's Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight. I love thee freely, as men strive for Right; I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints, — I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life! — and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
As Jupiter On Juno smiles, when he impregns the clouds That shed May flowers.
This is life to come, — Which martyred men have made more glorious For us who strive to follow. May I reach That purest heaven, — be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty, Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.
Eternal smiles his emptiness betray, / As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Prudens futuri temporis exitum / Caliginosa nocte premit Deus; / Ridetque, si mortalis ultra / Fas trepidat=--The Deity in His wisdom veils in the darkness of night the events of the future; and smiles if a mortal is unduly solicitous about what he is not permitted to know.
Her very frowns are fairer far Than smiles of other maidens are.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying; And this same flower that smiles today, Tomorrow will be dying.
Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step.
I 'm weary of conjectures,--this must end 'em. Thus am I doubly armed: my death and life, My bane and antidote, are both before me: This in a moment brings me to an end; But this informs me I shall never die. The soul, secured in her existence, smiles At the drawn dagger, and defies its point. The stars shall fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years; But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amidst the war of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds.
But Master is happy. I have seen him. He laughs and smiles. These reactions are rare … very rare for him.
A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy: the smile that accepts the lover before the words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first-born baby, and assures it of a mother's love.
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort As if he mock'd himself, and scorn'd his spirit That could be moved to smile at anything.
It is a grand old name, that of gentleman, and has been recognized as a rank and power in all stages of society. To possess this character is a dignity of itself, commanding the instinctive homage of every generous mind, and those who will not bow to titular rank will yet do homage to the gentleman. His qualities depend not upon fashion or manners, but upon moral worth; not on personal possessions, but on personal qualities. The Psalmist briefly describes him as one "that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and speaketh the truth in his heart."--_Samuel Smiles._
~Misery.~--There are a good many real miseries in life that we cannot help smiling at, but they are the smiles that make wrinkles and not dimples.--_Holmes._
Even happiness itself may become habitual. There is a habit of looking at the bright side of things, and also of looking at the dark side.
I commenced this Address by asking you to follow me in an attempt to trace the path which has been followed by a scientific idea, in its long and slow progress from the position of a probable hypothesis to that of an established law of nature. Our survey has not taken us into very attractive regions; it has lain, chiefly, in a land flowing with the abominable, and peopled with mere grubs and mouldiness. And it may be imagined with what smiles and shrugs, practical and serious contemporaries of Redi and of Spallanzani may have commented on the waste of their high abilities in toiling at the solution of problems which, though curious enough in themselves, could be of no conceivable utility to mankind.
Purposes, like eggs, unless they be hatched into action, will run into rottenness.
Make short the miles with talk and smiles.
Something of a person's character may be discovered by observing when and how he smiles. Some people never smile. They only grin.
A creature not too bright or good For human nature's daily food; For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
The first step in debt is like the first step in falsehood, almost involving the necessity of proceeding in the same course, debt following debt as lie follows lie. Haydon, the painter, dated his decline from the day on which he first borrowed money.--_Samuel Smiles._
Wisdom may sometimes wear a look austere, / But smiles and jests are oft her helpmates here.
He had only thought, and Wolsey had only thought, that the Emperor and Spain would be against it. Only the Emperor. He smiles in the dark, hands behind his head. He doesn't say which people, but waits for Liz to tell him. 'All women,' she says. 'All women everywhere in England. All women who have a daughter but not a son. All women who have lost a child. All women who have lost any hope of having a child. All women who are forty.
He reads much: / He is a great observer, and he looks / Quite through the deeds of men: he loves no plays, / As thou dost, Anthony; he hears no music: / Seldom he smiles; and smiles in such a sort / As if he mock'd himself, and scorn'd his spirit / That could be moved to smile at anything. / Such men as he be never at heart's ease / Whiles they behold a greater than themselves; / And therefore are they very dangerous.
What waste, what misery, what bankruptcy, come from all this ambition to dazzle others with the glare of apparent worldly success, we need not describe. The mischievous results show themselves in a thousand ways--in the rank frauds committed by men who dare to be dishonest, but do not dare to seem poor; and in the desperate dashes at fortune, in which the pity is not so much for those who fail, as for the hundreds of innocent families who are so often involved in their ruin.--_Samuel Smiles._
Full many a stoic eye and aspect stern / Masks hearts where grief has little left to learn; / And many a withering thought lies hid, not lost, / In smiles that least befit who wears them most.
"Heaven helps those who help themselves" is a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength. Help from without is often enfeebling in its effects, but help from within invariably invigorates. Whatever is done for men or classes, to a certain extent takes away the stimulus and necessity of doing for themselves; and where men are subjected to over-guidance and over-government, the inevitable tendency is to render them comparatively helpless.
Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindness, and small obligations given habitually, are what win the heart and secure comfort.
True humour springs not more from the head than from the heart; it is not contempt, its essence is love; it issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper. It is a sort of inverse sublimity, exalting, as it were, into our affections what is below us, while sublimity draws down into our affections what is above us.
Gather the rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying, / And this same flower that smiles to-day, / To-morrow will be dying.
Character is human nature in its best form. It is moral order embodied in the individual. Men of character are not only the conscience of society, but in every well-governed state they are its best motive power; for it is moral qualities in the main which rule the world.--_Samuel Smiles._
Bella femmina che ride, vuol dire borsa che piange=--The smiles of a pretty woman are the tears of the purse.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.
Never a tear bedims the eye / That time and patience will not dry; / Never a lip is curved in pain / That can't be kissed into smiles again.
As steady application to work is the healthiest training for every individual, so is it the best discipline of a state. Honorable industry always travels the same road with enjoyment and duty, and progress is altogether impossible without it.--_Samuel Smiles._
Be thou the rainbow to the storms of life, The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray!
Genius works in sport, and goodness smiles to the last.
To think we are able is almost to be so; to determine upon attainment is frequently attainment itself. Thus earnest resolution has often seemed to have about it almost a savor of omnipotence.--_Samuel Smiles._
~Observation.~--It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit in life. Human knowledge is but an accumulation of small facts, made by successive generations of men,--the little bits of knowledge and experience carefully treasured up by them growing at length into a mighty pyramid.--_Samuel Smiles._
~Smile.~--A woman has two smiles that an angel might envy--the smile that accepts a lover afore words are uttered, and the smile that lights on the first-born baby.--_Haliburton._
They knew me from the dawn of time: if Hermes beats his rainbow wings, If Angus shakes his locks of light, or golden-haired Apollo sings, It matters not the name, the land; my joy in all the gods abides: Even in the cricket in the grass some dimness of me smiles and hides.
I might be in love with you." He smiles a little. "I'm waiting until I'm sure to tell you, though.
Sunlight dances through the leaves Soft winds stir the sighing trees Lying in the warm grass Feel the sun upon your face Elven songs and endless nights Sweet wine and soft relaxing lights Time will never touch you Here in this enchanted place You feel there's something calling you You're wanting to return To where the misty mountains rise and friendly fires burn A place you can escape the world Where the dark lord cannot go Peace of mind and sanctuary by loud water's flow I've traveled now for many miles It feels so good to see the smiles of Friends who never left your mind When you were far away From the golden light of coming dawn Till the twilight where the sun is gone We treasure every season And every passing day We feel the coming of a new day Darkness gives way to light a new way Stop here for a while until the world, The world calls you away Yet you know I've had the feeling Standing with my senses reeling This is the place to grow old 'til I reach my final day.
Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.
Biographies of great, but especially of good men, are most instructive and useful as helps, guides, and incentives to others. Some of the best are almost equivalent to gospels--teaching high living, high thinking, and energetic action for their own and the world's good.--_Samuel Smiles._
The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort, / As if he mock'd himself, and scorn'd his spirit, / That could be moved to smile at anything.
There is a legend about a bird that sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. Dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of the great pain. … Or so says the legend.
Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy Sleep! / He, like the world, his ready visit pays / Where Fortune smiles; the wretched he forsakes: / Swift on his downy pinions flies from woe, / And lights on lids unsullied with a tear.
Nature smiles as sweet, I ween, / To shepherds as to kings.
When a man smiles, and much more when he laughs, it adds something to his fragment of life.
~Cheerfulness.~--Cheerfulness is also an excellent wearing quality. It has been called the bright weather of the heart.--_Samuel Smiles._
Those happiest smiles that played on her ripe lips seemed not to know what guests were in her eyes, which parted thence as pearls from diamonds dropped.--_Shakespeare._
His home! the Western giant smiles, And twirls the spotty globe to find it; This little speck, the British Isles? 'T is but a freckle,--never mind it.
The law is a sort of hocus-pocus science, that smiles in yer face while it picks yer pocket; and the glorious uncertainty of it is of mair use to the professors than the justice of it.
Firestone still smiles when he relates this, playing out each line of the dialogue in Americanized, but nearly perfect, Russian. And he tells me of the time he had to hide out in a government hospital to hide from corrupt cops (they could grab him anywhere apart from a hospital full of ministers); and when his first office was raided by thugs working for his neighbor and his staff were handcuffed to the furniture and threatened at knifepoint; or when he had to fly to New York and buy up all the bugging equipment at the Spy store to give to the antifraud squad in Moscow so they would have the equipment with which to bust other bent cops trying to extort money from him.
Though an inheritance of acres may be bequeathed, an inheritance of knowledge and wisdom cannot. The wealthy man may pay others for doing his work for him, but it is impossible to get his thinking done for him by another, or to purchase any kind of self-culture.--_Samuel Smiles._
Colours are the smiles of Nature ... her laughs, as in the flowers.
Every time a man smiles, much more when he laughs, it adds something to his fragment of life.
Liberty is quite as much a moral as a political growth, the result of free individual action, energy, and independence.
Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.
Oft in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Fond memory brings the light Of other days around me; The smiles, the tears, Of boyhood's years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shone Now dimmed and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken.
He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced--or seemed to face--the whole eternal world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey.
The robb'd that smiles, steals something from the thief.
One world, one mankind cannot exist in the face of six, four or even two scales of values: We shall be torn apart by this disparity of rhythm, this disparity of vibrations.… Our 20th Century has proved to be more cruel than preceding centuries, and the first fifty years have not erased all its horrors; our world is rent asunder by those same old cave-age emotions of greed, envy, lack of control, mutual hostility which have picked up in passing respectable pseudonyms like class struggle, radical conflict, struggle of the masses, trade-union disputes. The primeval refusal to accept a compromise has been turned into a theoretical principle and is considered the virtue of orthodoxy. It demands millions of sacrifices in ceaseless civil wars, it drums into our souls that there is no such thing as unchanging, universal concepts of goodness and justice, that they are all fluctuating and inconstant.… Violence, less and less embarrassed by the limits imposed by centuries of lawfulness, is brazenly and victoriously striding across the whole world, unconcerned that its infertility has been demonstrated and proved many times in history. What is more, it is not simply crude power that triumphs abroad, but its exultant justification. The world is being inundated by the brazen conviction that power can do anything, justice nothing.… The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the 19th Century, under the impression that they are discovering something new. They acclaim the latest wretched degradation on the part of the Chinese Red Guards as a joyous example. In shallow lack of understanding of the age-old essence of mankind, in the naive confidence of inexperienced hearts they cry: Let us drive away those cruel, greedy oppressors, governments, and the new ones (we), having just laid aside grenades and rifles, will be just and understanding. Far from it.… But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young—many do not dare oppose, they even suck up, anything not to appear conservative. Another Russian phenomenon of the 19th Century which Dostoyevsky called slavery to progressive quirks.… The timid civilized world has found nothing with which to oppose the onslaught of a sudden revival of barefaced barbarity, other than concessions and smiles.… The price of cowardice will only be evil. We shall reap courage and victory only when we dare to make sacrifices. [ The Wall Street Journal , September 6, 1972, p. 14.]
Tears are sometimes the happiest smiles of love.--_Stendhal._
The robb'd that smiles, steals something from the thief.
~Rectitude.~--The great high-road of human welfare lies along the highway of steadfast well-doing, and they who are the most persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will invariably be the most successful.--_Samuel Smiles._
Eternal smiles his emptiness betray, As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying, And this same flower that smiles to-day To-morrow will be dying.
Welcome ever smiles, And farewell goes out sighing.
Good example always brings forth good fruits.
Knowledge conquered by labour becomes a possession--a property entirely our own.
~Success.~--It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failure.--_Samuel Smiles._
There 's daggers in men's smiles.
Haste thee, Nymph, and bring with thee Jest and youthful Jollity, Quips and Cranks and wanton Wiles, Nods and Becks and wreathed Smiles.
Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.
This world is all a fleeting show, / For man's illusion given: / The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, / Deceitful shine, deceitful flow, / There's nothing true but heaven.
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.
This world is all a fleeting show, For man's illusion given; The smiles of joy, the tears of woe, Deceitful shine, deceitful flow,-- There 's nothing true but Heaven.
Jones' Second Law: The man who smiles when things go wrong has thought of someone to blame it on.
Every man who is high up likes to think that he has done it all himself, and the wife smiles and lets it go at that. -- Barrie
"...'fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles</p> as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming." -- Siddartha, _Lord_of_Light_ by Roger Zelazny
* woot smiles serenely. <woot> I don't want to seem over eager about getting into knghtbrd's siglist.
The garden is in mourning; The rain falls cool among the flowers. Summer shivers quietly On its way towards its end. Golden leaf after leaf Falls from the tall acacia. Summer smiles, astonished, feeble, In this dying dream of a garden. For a long while, yet, in the roses, She will linger on, yearning for peace, And slowly Close her weary eyes. -- Hermann Hesse, "September"
... "fire" does not matter, "earth" and "air" and "water" do not matter. "I" do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming. -- Roger Zelazny, "Lord of Light"
Only someone with nothing to be sorry for smiles back at the rear of an elephant.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been. -- Mark Twain
"Well said, forehead; your declaration shall be respected. I have formed my plans--right plans I deem them--and in them I have attended to the claims of conscience, the counsels of reason. I know how soon youth would fade and bloom perish, if, in the cup of bliss offered, but one dreg of shame, or one flavour of remorse were detected; and I do not want sacrifice, sorrow, dissolution--such is not my taste. I wish to foster, not to blight--to earn gratitude, not to wring tears of blood--no, nor of brine: my harvest must be in smiles, in endearments, in sweet--That will do. I think I rave in a kind of exquisite delirium. I should wish now to protract this moment _ad infinitum_; but I dare not. So far I have governed myself thoroughly. I have acted as I inwardly swore I would act; but further might try me beyond my strength. Rise, Miss Eyre: leave me; the play is played out'."
Let us see, why should his father be indignant? Are there not cases where insurrection rises to the dignity of duty? What was there that was degrading for the son of Colonel Pontmercy in the combat which was about to begin? It is no longer Montmirail nor Champaubert; it is something quite different. The question is no longer one of sacred territory,--but of a holy idea. The country wails, that may be, but humanity applauds. But is it true that the country does wail? France bleeds, but liberty smiles; and in the presence of liberty's smile, France forgets her wound. And then if we look at things from a still more lofty point of view, why do we speak of civil war?