Heaven helps those who help themselves.

Self-Help opens with these words, and Smiles at once calls them “a well-tried maxim, embodying in a small compass the results of vast human experience”. The chapter continues in the same key: the spirit of self-help is “the root of all genuine growth in the individual”, and while help from without is often enfeebling, help from within invariably invigorates.

The book grew out of a talk that Smiles, a Scottish doctor turned journalist, gave in the 1840s to young working men in Leeds who had formed an evening class to improve themselves. Published in London in 1859, the year of Darwin’s Origin of Species, it strung together the lives of engineers, inventors and craftsmen who had risen by their own efforts, and became one of the best-selling books of the Victorian age.

The maxim itself is much older: Aesop’s fables, La Fontaine’s “Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera” and Franklin’s Poor Richard all have versions of it. Often taken for a verse of the Bible, it is not in Scripture.

Self-Help, chapter I (opening words), 1859

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work