Samuel Smiles：Self-Help, Excerpt 201

To provide for others and for our own comfort and independence in old age, is honourable, and greatly to be commended; but to hoard for mere wealth’s sake is the characteristic of the narrow-souled and the miserly. It is against the growth of this habit of inordinate saving that the wise man needs most carefully to guard himself: else, what in youth was simple economy, may in old age grow into avarice, and what was a duty in the one case, may become a vice in the other. It is the _love_ of money—not money itself—which is “the root of evil,”—a love which narrows and contracts the soul, and closes it against generous life and action. Hence, Sir Walter Scott makes one of his characters declare that “the penny siller slew more souls than the naked sword slew bodies.” It is one of the defects of business too exclusively followed, that it insensibly tends to a mechanism of character. The business man gets into a rut, and often does not look beyond it. If he lives for himself only, he becomes apt to regard other human beings only in so far as they minister to his ends. Take a leaf from such men’s ledger and you have their life.

Source： https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/935
Locator：Excerpt 201 · Verified：2026-10-19 · Verification：Short excerpt

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