Elbert Green Hubbard Quotes

The man who is anybody and who does anything is certainly going to be criticized, vilified and misunderstood. This is a part of the penalty for greatness, and every great man understands it; and understands, too, that it is no proof of greatness.

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

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

Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.

In these days, a man who says a thing cannot be done, quite apt to be interrupted by some idiot doing it.

...one grows to the belief that, while woman's glory is in her hair, man's glory is to defeat some one. And if he can 'defeat with great slaughter' his monument is twice as high as if he had only visited on his brother man a plain undoing.

Positive anything is better than negative nothing.

Laughter is higher than all pain.

If men could only know each other, they would never either idolize or hate.

Never explain — your friends do not need it and your enemies will not believe you anyway

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

Men are only as great as they are kind.

Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds — the man who, against great odds, has directed the efforts of others, and having succeeded, finds there's nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner pail and worked for day's wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous. My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the "boss" is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid off" nor has to go on a strike for higher wages.

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."

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