Quotations by Author

Elbert Hubbard

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

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

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

No matter what you've done for yourself or for humanity, if you can't look back on having given love and attention to your own family, what have you really accomplished?

A man is not paid for having a head and hands, but for using them.

Responsibilities gravitate to the person who can shoulder them.

Often we can help each other most by leaving each other alone; at other times we need the hand-grasp and the word of cheer.

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

If we cannot be happy and powerful and prey on others, we invent conscience and prey on ourselves.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas, but for scars.

There is no failure except in no longer trying.

We awaken in others the same attitude of mind we hold toward them.

Positive anything is better than negative thinking.

This will never be a civilized country (child) until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

Responsibility is the price of freedom.

The object of teaching a child is to enable him to get along without his teacher.

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: Be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

Love grows by giving. The love we give away is the only love we keep. The only way to retain love is to give it away.

Theology, by diverting the attention of men from this life to another, and by endeavoring to coerce all men into one religion, constantly preaching that this world is full of misery, but the next world would be beautiful -- or not, as the case may be -- has forced on men the thought of fear where otherwise there might have been the happy abandon of nature.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.

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

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

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.