Elbert Hubbard Quotes

Life is a movement outward, an unfolding.

A form of self-delusion.

Every spirit makes its house, but as afterwards the house confines the spirit, you had better build well.

Gossip is only the lack of a worthy memory.

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

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

The happiness of this life depends less on what befalls you than the way in which you take it.

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

The valuable person in any business is the individual who can and will cooperate with others.

We will not be dictated to by men with less intelligence, energy, initiative and ambition than we ourselves possess.

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

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

Impossible things are simply those which so far have never been done.

The average man believes a thing first, and then searches for proof to bolster his opinion

There is no failure except the failure of trying.

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

Do not dump your woes upon people — keep the sad story of your life to yourself. Troubles grow by recounting them.

Perfume: any smell that is used to drown a worse one.

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.

Let a man once see himself as others see him, and all enthusiasm vanishes from his heart.

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

Life is a paradox. Every truth has its counterpart which contradicts it; and every philosopher supplies the logic his own undoing.

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.

The Great Man is a man who lives a long way off.

Postponement: The father of failure.

Old ways will always remain unless some one invents a new way and then lives and dies for it

Habit: The great economizer of energy.

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

A book on cheap paper does not convince. It is not prized, it is like a wheezy doctor with pigtail tobacco breath, who needs a manicure.

Lawyers are the jackals of commerce.

Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.

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

Souls are made of dawn-stuff and starshine.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

The man who knows it can't be done counts the risk, not the reward.

Anyone who idolizes you is going to hate you when he discovers that you are fallible. He never forgives. He has deceived himself, and he blames you for it.

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

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

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

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

Study: concentration of the mind on whatever will ultimately put something in your pocket.

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

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

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.

Imitation is the sincerest form of insult.

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

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

An American religion: Work, play, breathe, bathe, study, live, laugh, and love.

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

Enthusiasm is like having two right hands.