Top 461 Quotes & Sayings by Elbert Hubbard - Page 6

I believe in courtesy, in kindness, in generosity, in good cheer, in friendship and in honest competition. I believe there is something doing somewhere, for every man ready to do it. I believe I'm ready, RIGHT NOW.

Charity: a thing that begins at home, and usually stays there.

Give us a religion that will help us to live - we can die without assistance.

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

Every life is its own excuse for being.

Prosperity: that condition which attracts the lively interest of lawyers, and warrants your being sued for damages, or indicted, or both.

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

As a career, the business of an orthodox preacher is about as successful as that of a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat through hell.

Religions are many and diverse, but reason and goodness are one.

History: a collection of epitaphs.

The poor and ignorant will continue to lie and steal as long as the rich and educated show them how.

We never ask God to forgive anybody except when we haven't.

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

Falling in love is the beginning of all wisdom, all sympathy, all compassion, all art, all religion; and in it's larger sense is the one thing in life worth doing.

If you work for a man, in Heavens name work for him! If he pays you wages that supply your bread and butter, work for him, stand by him, and stand by the institution he represents.

Fortitude: That quality of mind which does not care what happens so long as it does not happen to us.

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

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

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

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

Unleash your TRAVEL BEAST .... explore the world. It's time to begin your next adventure! No man needs a vacation so much as the person who has just had one.

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

Souls are made of dawn-stuff and starshine.

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

Postponement: The father of failure.

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

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

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

The goal of evolution is self - conquest

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.

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.

A committee is a thing which takes a week to do what one good man can do in an hour.

Art is nothing; it's a way.

Some men succeed by what they know; some by what they do; and a few by what they are.

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.

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

If I supply you with a thought, you may remember it and you may not. But if I can make you think a thought for yourself, I have indeed added to your stature.

All noise is waste. So cultivate quietness in your speech, in your thoughts, in your emotions. Speak habitually low. Wait for attention and then you low words will be charged with dynamite.

Self-control is the ability to restrain a laugh at the wrong place.

There are three sides to every question-where a divorce is involved.

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

Gossip is vice enjoyed vicariously

God is good, there is no devil but fear.

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

The artist needs no religion beyond his work.

Human service is the highest form of self-interest for the person who serves.

Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.

Who are the happiest people on earth? A craftsman or artist whistling over a job well done. A little child building sand castles. A mother, after a busy day, bathing her baby. A doctor who has finished a difficult and dangerous operation, and saved a human life. Happiness lies in a constructive job well done. Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what happiness is.

Pessimist: One who has been intimately acquainted with an Optimist.

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

Morality is the thing upon which your friends smile, and immorality is the thing upon which they frown

History: gossip well told.

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.

Knowledge is the distilled essence of our institutions, corroborated by experience.

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

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.

Seeing with better eyes We can recognize that the offender is a valuable human being who struggles with the same needs, pressures, and confusions that we struggle with. We will recognize that the incident really may not have been about us in the first place. Instead it was about the wrongdoer's misguided attempt to meet his or her own needs. As we regard offenders from this point of view (regardless of whether they repent and regardless of what they have done or suffered), we will be in a position to forgive them.

An imitator is a man who succeeds in being an imitation.

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.

Talent does things tolerably well; genius does then intolerably better