Elbert Hubbard Quotations | Page 3

The secret of salvation is this: keep sweet, be useful, and keep busy.

Failure -- The man who can tell others what to do and how to do it, but never does it himself.

Most reformers wore rubber boots and stood on glass when God sent a current of Commonsense through the Universe.

Reason: The arithmetic of the emotions.

God — the John Doe of philosophy and religion.

The line between failure and success is so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a person has thrown up his or her hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success.

All wages are based primarily on productive power. Anything else would be charity.

The newspapers print what the people want, and thus does the savage still swing his club and flourish his spear.

Woman's inaptitude for reasoning has not prevented her from arriving at truth; nor has man's ability to reason prevented him from floundering in absurdity.

Some one has said that we are moving so fast that when plans are being made to perform some great feat, these plans are broken into by a youth who enters and says, “I have done it.

No man should dogmatize except on the subject of theology. Here he can take his stand, and by throwing the burden of proof on the opposition, he is invincible. We have to die to find out whether he is right.

God is good, there is no devil but fear.

Academic education is the act of memorizing things read in books, and things told by college professors who got their education mostly by memorizing things read in books.

Prison is a Socialist paradise where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated.

As a rule, the man who can do all things equally well is a very mediocre individual.

A man's acts are usually right, but his reasons seldom are.

The great Big Black Things that have loomed against the horizon of my life, threatening to devour me, simply loomed and nothing more. The things that have really made me miss my train have always been sweet, soft, pretty, pleasant things of which I was not in the least afraid.

If it was woman who put man out of Paradise, it is still woman, and woman only, who can lead him back.

Man is Creation's masterpiece. But who says so?

Real life is in love, laughter, and work.

I will gladly lecture for fifty dollars, but I'll not be a guest for less than a hundred.

The heroic man does not pose; he leaves that for the man who wishes to be thought heroic.

I rather like the World. The Flesh is pleasing and the Devil does not trouble me.

To know the great men dead is compensation for having to live with the mediocre.

If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all?

A poor man who eats too much, as contradistinguished from a gourmand, who is a rich man who ''lives well.''

Your neighbor is the man who needs you.

What we call God's justice is only man's idea of what he would do if he were God.

Every man who speaks out loud and clear is tinting the "Zeitgeist." Every man who expresses what he honestly thinks is true is changing the Spirit of the Times. Thinkers help other people to think, for they formulate what others are thinking. No person writes or thinks alone--thought is in the air, but its expression is necessary to create a tangible Spirit of the Times.

A person may be very secretive and yet have no secrets.

An executive is one who makes an immediate decision and is sometimes right

Enthusiasm is like having two right hands.

I believe in salvation through economic, social, and spiritual freedom.

The average man plays to the gallery of his own self-esteem.

The trouble with many married people is that they are trying to get more out of marriage than there is in it.

Genius is the capacity of avoiding hard work.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

Souls are made of dawn-stuff and starshine.

When certain unmarried men, who had lost their capacity to sin, sat indoors, breathing bad air, and passed resolutions about what was right and what wrong, making rules for the guidance of the people, instead of trusting to the natural, happy instincts of the individual, they ushered in the Dark Ages. These are the gentlemen who blocked human evolution absolutely for a thousand years.

When trouble comes, wise men take to their work; weak men take to the woods.

There is a joy in going without things, a fine tang in eliminating the superfluous.

Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.

To have a full stomach and fixed income are no small things .

Time is an eternal guest that banquets on our ideals and bodies.

Time is an illusion-to orators.

Wise Man: One who sees the storm coming before the clouds appear.

Every knock is a boost.

If there is any better way to teach virtue than by practicing it, I do not know it.

Success is the most natural thing in the world. The person who does not succeed has placed himself in opposition to the laws of the Universe.

The inspirations of today are the shams of tomorrow the purpose has departed.

Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one's horse as he is leaping. Happiness is a habit. Cultivate it.

Public opinion is the judgment of the incapable many opposed to that of the discerning few.

Be patient with the boys - you are dealing with soul-stuff.

Some men can get results if kindly encouraged, but give me the kind that do things in spite of hell.

Success - To rise from the illusion of pursuit to the disillusion of possession.

No matter how long you live, die young.

Prophecy - To observe that which has passed, and guess it will happen again.

Insomnia never comes to a man who has to get up exactly at six o'clock. Insomnia troubles only those who can sleep any time.

The wise way to benefit humanity is to attend to your own affairs, and thus give other people an opportunity to look after theirs.

There have always existed three ways of keeping the people loving and loyal. One is to leave them alone, to trust them and not to interfere. This plan, however, has very seldom been practised, because the politicians regard the public as a cow to be milked, and something must be done to make it stand quiet.

Would you make men better - set them an example. The millenium will never come until governments cease from governing, and the meddler is at rest.

Progress needs the brakeman, but the brakeman should not spend all his time putting on the brakes.

A little more patience, a little more charity for all, a little more devotion, a little more love; with less bowing down to the past, and a silent ignoring of pretended authority; brave looking forward to the future with more faith in our fellows, and the race will be ripe for a great burst of light and life.

You can go wrong by being too skeptical as readily as by being too trusting. You can lead a boy to college but you cannot make him think.

The only way to retain love is to give it away.

Business is a fight, a continual struggle, just as life is

The weaknesses of the many make the leader possible.

Formal religion was organized for slaves: it offered them consolation which earth did not provide.

If you don't advertise yourself you will be advertised by your loving enemies.

Men who sit back and pride themselves on their culture haven't any to speak of.

Man creates both his god and his devil in his own image. His god is himself at his best, and his devil himself at his worst.

Jealousy seems the absolute reversal of love. It is the swinging from the sunny warmth of the Equator to the frigid cold of the North Pole.

Lawyers are the jackals of commerce.

Life is a movement outward, an unfolding.

Life is a voyage, and we are all sailing under sealed orders. We plan, plot, scheme and arrange, and some fine day Fate steps in and our dreams are tossed into the yeasty deep. We grin and bear it--anyway we bear it: it is the only thing to do.

Life consists in molting our illusions. We form creeds today only to throw them away tomorrow. The eagle molts a feather because he is growing a better one.

To subjugate another is to subjugate yourself.

People who are able to do their own thinking should not allow others to do it for them.

Habit: The great economizer of energy.

No good sensible working bee listens to the advice of a bedbug on the subject of business.

It is not deeds or acts that last: it is the written record of those deeds and acts.

Gossip is vice enjoyed vicariously

Government is a kind of legalized pillage.

Laws that do not embody public opinion can never be enforced.

Mystic: a person who is puzzled before the obvious, but who understands the non-existent.

Every quarrel begins in nothing and ends in a struggle for supremacy.

Righteous indignation: your own wrath as opposed to the shocking bad temper of others

The man who is so run down that he needs a vacation can never adjust or reform himself in two weeks. What he really needs is to re-transform his life.

War is the sure result of the existence of armed men. That country which maintains a large standing army will sooner or later have a war. The man who prides himself on fisticuffs is going, some day, to meet a man who considers himself the better man, and they will test the issue.

Yesterday woman was a chattel. Now she is, in law, a minor. Tomorrow she will be free, or partially so--that is to say, as free as man.

Men who marry for gratification, propagation or the matter of buttons or socks, must expect to cope with and deal in a certain amount of quibble, subterfuge, concealments, and double, deep-dyed prevarication.

Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments.

All good men are anarchists. All cultured, kindly men; all gentlemen; all just men are anarchists. Jesus was an anarchist.

Martyrs and persecutors are the same type of man. As to which is the persecutor and which the martyr, this is only a question of transient power.

Theology is Classified Superstition.

A creed is an ossified metaphor.

Heaven: The Coney Island of the Christian imagination.

Orthodoxy is a corpse that doesn't know it's dead.

I am not sure just what the unpardonable sin is, but I believe it is a disposition to evade the payment of small bills.

Do not go out of your way to do good whenever it comes your way. Men who make a business of doing good to others are apt to hate others in the same occupation. Simply be filled with the thought of good, and it will radiate you do not have to bother about it, any more than you need trouble about your digestion.