Elbert Hubbard Quotes

page 2

“A conservative is a man who is too cowardly to fight and too fat to run.”

“Laughter is higher than all pain.”

“Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping stones to genius.”

“It's a fine thing to have ability, but the ability to discover ability in others is the true test.”

“I wish to live without hate, whim, jealousy, envy, and fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank, natural.. to face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.”

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

“A retentive memory may be a good thing, but the ability to forget is the true token of greatness.”

“Nothing is permanent but change.”

“The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination.”

“We work to become, not to acquire.”

“Responsibility is the price of freedom.”

“Parties who want milk should not seat themselves on a stool in the middle of the field in hope that the cow will back up to them.”

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

“Our admiration is so given to dead martyrs that we have little time for living heroes.”

“Why not be a top-notcher? A top-notcher is simply an individual who works for the institution of which he is a part, not against it.”

“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."”

“When you see a tomcat with his whiskers full of feathers, do not say "Canary!" — he'll take offense.”

“Young women with ambitions should be very crafty and cautious, lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.”

“Wealth: A cunning device of Fate whereby men are made captive, and burdened with responsibilites from which only Death can file their fetters.”

“An idea that is not dangerous is not worthy of being called an idea at all.”

“Literary people of the opposite sex do not really love each other. All they really desire is to read their manuscript aloud to a receptive listener.”

“Perfume; Any smell that is used to drown a worse one.”

“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.”

“If we ever damned it will not be because we have loved too much, but because we have loved too little.”

“If you want work well done, select a busy man ‚ the other kind has no time.”

“The sad thing about the optimist is his state of mind concerning himself.”

“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.”

“Should we have an Eleventh Commandment?" asked a youth of the Greatest Living Actress. "Most assuredly, no - we have ten too many now!”

“Good people are only half as good, and bad people only half as bad, as other people regard them.”

“It takes brains to make money, but any dam fool can inherit. P. S.: I never inherited any money.”

“To supply a thought is mental massage; but to evolve a thought of your own is an achievement. Thinking is a brain exercise — and no faculty grows save as it is exercised.”

“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.”

“Too often the reformer has been one who caused the rich to band themselves against the poor.”

“Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.”

“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.”

“Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals.
Anything such a man asks shall be granted. He is wanted in every city, town and village — in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such: he is needed and needed badly — the man who can "Carry a Message to Garcia."”

“The happiest mortals on earth are ladies who have been bereaved by the loss of their husbands.”

“Philosophy rests on a proposition that whatever is is right. Preaching begins by assuming that whatever is is wrong.”

“Piety is the tinfoil of pretense.”

“Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes.”

“It is not to be wondered that men have worshiped the ocean, for in his depths they have seen mirrored the image of Eternity — of Infinity. Here they have seen the symbol of God's great plan of oneness with His creatures, for the sea is the union of all infinite particles, and it takes the whole to make the one.”

“Knowledge is the distilled essence of our intuitions, corroborated by experience.”

“The way to learn to earn a living is to go at it and earn a living.”

“Life is a compromise between fate and free will.”

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

“There is no such thing as success in a bad business.”

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

“The graveyards are full of people the world could not do without.”

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