Motherhood Quote by Samuel Smiles

Hope, for Smiles, is not a soft feeling but a form of leverage. The Victorian self-help prophet who wrote Self-Help (1859) lived in a Britain intoxicated by industry, upward mobility, and the moral romance of hard work. In that world, “power” isn’t political office; it’s agency. By calling hope the “companion of power,” Smiles smuggles an argument about class and control into a virtue: the person who hopes behaves like someone who can act, and that behavior is itself a kind of power.

The line is engineered to convert an interior state into an engine of outcomes. “Mother of success” gives hope a domestic, generative role: success isn’t luck or inheritance but something you can “birth” through sustained expectation. Smiles is writing against fatalism, but also against the idea that systems decide everything. The subtext is bracing and a little unforgiving: if miracles are “within him,” then failure starts to look like a deficit of spirit. That’s the appeal and the trap of his ethos.

The masterstroke is the word “miracles.” Smiles borrows religious vocabulary to sanctify secular striving. He doesn’t promise divine intervention; he reframes perseverance, optimism, and risk tolerance as supernatural gifts. It works because it flatters the reader into responsibility: hope isn’t consolation for the powerless, it’s proof you’re not powerless. In a century of factories and sermons, Smiles offers a doctrine that makes ambition feel like moral destiny.