Elbert Hubbard Quotes

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private individuals will occasionally kill theirs.

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

The thing we fear we bring to pass.

The ineffable joy of forgiving and being forgiven forms an ecstasy that might well arouse the envy of the gods.

Heaven: The Coney Island of the Christian imagination.

The teacher is one who makes two ideas grow where only one grew before.

Wisdom must go with Sympathy, else the emotions will become maudlin and pity may be wasted on a poodle instead of a child-on a field-mouse instead of a human soul.

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

Habit is a form of exercise.

One thing is sure, there are just two respectable ways to die. One is of old age, and the other is by accident.

Life without absorbing occupation is hell; joy consists in forgetting life.

The worst thing about medicine is that one kind makes another necessary

I believe in the hands that work, in the brains that think, and in the hearts that love...I believe in sunshine, fresh air, friendship, calm sleep, beautiful thoughts.

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

Football: A sport that bears the same relation to education that bullfighting does to agriculture.

A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman is as bad as she dares

Of all blessings, no gift equals the gentle, trusting love and companionship of a good woman.

If you have no enemies you are apt to be in the same predicament in regard to friends.

Victory; a matter of staying power.

Love is not really blind- the bandage is never so tight but that it can peep.

In God's great vaudeville, Mother is the headliner.

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

Blessed is the man who has found someone to do his work.

Laughter is higher than all pain.

In these days, a man who says a thing cannot be done is quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot doing it.

Life in abundance comes only through great love.

Success is voltage under control-keeping one hand on the transformer of your Kosmic Kilowatts.

The fool is not the man who merely does foolish things. The fool is the man who does not know enough to cash in on his foolishness.

Lawyers are men whom we hire to protect us from lawyers.

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.

The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture.

It is a curious fact that of all the illusions that beset mankind none is quite so curious as that tendency to suppose that we are mentally and morally superior to those who differ from us in opinion.

A failure is a man who has blundered, but is not able to cash in the experience.

If men could only know each other, they would neither idolize nor hate.

Every tyrant who ever lived has believed in freedom — for himself.

There is a wild, splendid, intoxicating joy that follows work well done.

The cure for grief is motion.

The love we give away is the only love we keep.

Money never made a fool of anybody; it only shows them up.

Every life is its own excuse for being, and to deny or refute the untrue things that are said of you is an error in judgment. All wrong recoils upon the doer, and the person who makes wrong statements about others is themselves to be pitied, not the person they vilify. It is better to be lied about than to lie. At the last no one can harm us but ourselves.

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.

No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.

Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.

When we really live truth, we will cease to talk about it.

Not only does beauty fade, but it leaves a record upon the face as to what became of it.

I have no perfect panacea for human ills. And even if I had I would not attempt to present a system of philosophy between the soup and fish.

Freedom cannot be bestowed - it must be achieved.

If your religion does not change you, then you had better change your religion.