Self-Help
Samuel Smiles · 1859
5.0 · 7 ratings
About the book
The Victorian gospel of perseverance: engineers, potters and shopkeepers who worked their way up, told as one long argument that character outperforms circumstance. It outsold Darwin in its first year, and founded the entire genre this shelf sits on.
Try the short course
Part 1 · Heaven helps those who help themselves. The first six slides, free.
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Samuel Smiles opens his book with a proverb everyone's grandmother knew: “Heaven helps those who help themselves.” He doesn't apologise for its age. He calls it a well-tried maxim that packs a vast amount of human experience into a single line.
Then he makes the claim the rest of the book hangs on. The spirit of self-help, he writes, is “the root of all genuine growth in the individual.”
Notice the word genuine. Smiles isn't saying people can't be taught, polished or rescued from outside. He is saying that the growth which actually belongs to a person, the kind that stays when the helper goes home, only ever starts from inside them.
Inside the course
20 parts- «Heaven helps those who help themselves»Free above
- National progress as the sum of individual industry
- Inventors and producers: the leaders of industry
- Arkwright, Watt, Stephenson: the self-made engineers
Questions
Is Self-Help free to read in Astra Trainer?
Yes. The full book opens free in the app’s reader, in English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian.
What is the short course?
20 short parts that walk through the book’s key ideas in slides, each with a quick quiz. The first six slides are free to try on this page.
Where do I get the app?
Astra Trainer is free on the App Store and Google Play. Self-Help is waiting in the app’s library.
