War & Peace Quote by Samuel Smiles

Smiles is selling a deceptively sharp idea: peace isn’t achieved by winning arguments, it’s achieved by absorbing friction. “Bear and forbear” sounds like a quaint Victorian couplet, but it’s really a social technology - a manual for navigating crowded modernity without constantly turning grievance into combat. The phrase works because it yokes two kinds of restraint: bear (endure what you can’t control) and forbear (choose not to press your advantage even when you could). That second verb is the harder one; it implies power withheld, not weakness.

The intent is moral instruction, but the subtext is political and economic. Smiles, best known for Self-Help, wrote for an industrial Britain that was rapidly reorganizing life around factories, cities, and class contact. When people are jammed together - at work, in tenements, in institutions - civility becomes infrastructure. “Live at peace with others” isn’t dreamy idealism; it’s a practical demand for self-regulation in a society where one person’s impulsive anger can ripple outward as conflict, lost wages, or reputational damage.

There’s also a quiet conservatism embedded here. The burden is placed on the “wise man” to adapt, to manage himself rather than challenge the structures producing irritation. Smiles frames endurance as wisdom, which flatters the reader into compliance. It’s elegant rhetorical judo: you don’t just tolerate others; you prove your superiority by not needing to dominate them.