Elbert Hubbard Quotes

266 Sourced Quotes

If you err it is not for me to punish you. We are punished by our sins not for them.

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

Elbert Hubbard
It is not book learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebra which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies, do a thing.

Elbert Hubbard
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.

Elbert Hubbard
When you once attribute effects to the will of a personal God, you have let in a lot of little gods and evils - then sprites, fairies, dryads, naiads, witches, ghosts and goblins, for your imagination is reeling, riotous, drunk, afloat on the flotsam of superstition. What you know then doesn't count. You just believe, and the more your believe the more do you plume yourself that fear and faith are superior to science and seeing.

Elbert Hubbard
I believe that brutality tends to defeat itself. Prizefighters die young, gourmands get the gout, hate hurts worse the man who nurses it, and all selfishness robs the mind of its divine insight, and cheats the soul that would know. Mind alone is eternal. He, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps. My faith is great: out of the transient darkness of the present the shadows will flee away, and Day will yet dawn. I am an Anarchist.

Elbert Hubbard
Most Authors cringe and flatter and Fish for compliments. If they fail to get Applause, they say the World is a Scurvy Place and those who dwell therein a Dirty Lot: if they succeed, they give thanks to Nobody, saying they got only what their Meritt entitles them to. But I rather like the World. The Flesh is pleasing and the Devil does not trouble me.

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

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

Elbert Hubbard
We find what we expect to find, and we receive what we ask for.

Elbert Hubbard
A pessimist is a man who has been compelled to live with an optimist.

Elbert Hubbard
Perfume; Any smell that is used to drown a worse one.

Elbert Hubbard
There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability. The sternest comment that can be made against employers as a class lies in the fact that men of Ability usually succeed in showing their worth in spite of their employer, and not with his assistance and encouragement.

Elbert Hubbard
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.

Elbert Hubbard
Life is a dangerous business — few indeed get out of it alive.

Elbert Hubbard
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.

Elbert Hubbard
Nature, n. The Unseen Intelligence which loved us into being, and is disposing of us by the same token.

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

Elbert Hubbard
I would rather be able to appreciate things I can not have than to have things I am not able to appreciate.

Elbert Hubbard
He picked up the lemons that Fate had sent him and started a lemonade-stand.

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

Elbert Hubbard
Love, we say, is life; but love without hope and faith is agonizing death.

Elbert Hubbard
Respectability is the dickey on the bosom of civilization.

Elbert Hubbard
Do your work with your whole heart, and you will succeed - there's so little competition.

Elbert Hubbard
When you cannot answer your opponent's logic, do not be discouraged—You can still call him vile names.

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

Elbert Hubbard
Folks who never do any more than they get paid for, never get paid for any more than they do

Elbert Hubbard
Life is just one damned thing after another.

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

Elbert Hubbard
The difference in men does not lie in the size of their hands, nor in the perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of concentration: to throw the weight in one blow, to live eternity in an hour.

Elbert Hubbard