Elbert Hubbard

“ Rome was very wise—her policies were the crystallizations of the world-wisdom of centuries. The church-militant battle-cry, "The world for Christ," simply means man's lust for ownership, with Christ as an excuse. If ever there was a man-made institution, it is the Church. To control mankind has been her desire, and the miracle is that, with a promise of heaven, a threat of hell, and a firm grip on temporal power—social and military—she was ever induced partially to loosen her grip. To such men as Savonarola, Luther and Erasmus, do we owe our freedom. ”

“ Said Hypatia: "Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fancies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child-mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after-years relieved of them. In fact, men will fight for a superstition quite as quickly as for a living truth—often more so, since a superstition is so intangible you can not get at it to refute it, but truth is a point of view, and so is changeable." ”

“ Of a future existence he knows nothing, and he seems to regard it as a waste of energy and a sign of weakness to live in two worlds at a time. "Heaven provides us means of knowing all about what is best here, and supplies us in abundance every material thing for present happiness, and it is our business to realize, to know, to enjoy."
He taught rhetoric, mathematics, economics, the science of government and natural history. And always and forever running through the fabric of his teaching was the silken thread of ethics—man's duty to man, man's duty to Heaven. ”

“ Let us say right here that there is only one way in which a Negro, or a white man, can ever make himself respected. Statute law will not do it; rights voted him by the State are of small avail; making demands will not secure the desired sesame. If we ever gain the paradise of freedom it will be because we have earned it—because we deserve it. A make-believe education may suffice for a white man—especially if he has a rich father, but a Negro who has to carve out his own destiny must be taught order, system, and quiet, persistent, useful effort. ”

“ Matthew Arnold has slipped back into his true position—that of a man of letters. The genius is a man of affairs. Humanity is the theme, not books. Books are usually written about the thoughts of men who wrote books. Books die and disintegrate, but humanity is an endless procession, and the souls that go marching on are those who fought for freedom, not those who speculate on abstrusities.
The credential of Thomas Arnold to immortality is not that he was the father of Matthew and eight other little Arnolds, but it lies in the fact that he fought for a wider horizon in life through education. ”

“ This seems to us like a very queer way to hold court, but Confucius maintained that men should learn to govern their tempers, do equity, and thus be able to settle their own disputes, and this without violence. "To fight decides who is the stronger, the younger and the more skilful in the use of arms, but it does not decide who is right. That is to be settled by the Heaven in your own heart."
To let the Heaven into your heart, to cultivate a conscience so sensitive that it can conceive the rights of the other man, is to know wisdom. ”

“ And so he lived and died an Englishman; and after him no ruler, these nine hundred years, has ever sat on the throne of the Engles by right of conquest.
Both Canute and William recognized and prized the worth of Alfred's rule. The virtues of Alfred are the virtues that have made it possible for the Teutonic tribes to girdle the globe. It was Alfred who taught the nobility of industry, service, education, patience, loyalty, persistence, and the faith and hope that abide. By pen, tongue, and best of all by his life, Alfred taught the truths which we yet hold dear. ”

“ Now we can not all run away, and for some to flee from humanity and to find solace in solitude is only another name for weakness."
This sounds singularly like our Ralph Waldo who says, "It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinions; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the Great Man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude."
Confucius is the first man in point of time to proclaim the divinity of service, the brotherhood of man, and the truth that in useful work there is no high nor low degree. ”

“ His service was honorable, even if not brilliant, and it had this advantage: the making of two friends, companions in arms, who caught the Pestalozzian fever, and lived out their lives preaching and teaching "the new method."
These men were William Middendorf and Henry Langenthal. This trinity of brothers evolved a bond as beautiful as it is rare in the realm of friendship. Forty years after their first meeting, Middendorf gave an oration over the dead body of Froebel that lives as a classic, breathing the love and faith that endure. ”

“ New Thought is founded on the laws of your own nature, and its shibboleth is, "Know Thyself."
Secondhand Thought is founded on authority, and its war-cry is, "Pay and Obey."
New Thought offers you no promise of paradise or eternal bliss if you accept it; nor does it threaten you with everlasting hell, if you don't. All it offers is unending work, constant effort, new difficulties; beyond each success is a new trial. ”

“ Over his head blazes, in letters that burn, the unforgetable date, Fourteen Hundred Ninety-two. He was a part of the great unrest, and he helped cause the great unrest. Every great awakening, every renaissance, is an age of doubt. An age of conservatism is an age of moss, of lichen, of rest, rust and ruin. We grow only as we question. As long as we are sure that the present order [Pg 154] is perfect, we button our collars behind, a thing which Columbus, Luther, Melanchthon, Erasmus, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Gutenberg, who all lived at this one time, never did. ”

“ Knowledge is a personal matter of intuition, confirmed by experience. Learning consists largely of the things we memorize and are told by persons or books. Tomlinson of Berkeley Square was a learned man. When we think of a learned man, we picture him as one seated in a library surrounded by tomes that top the shelves.
Wisdom is the distilled essence of what we have learned from experience. It is that which helps us to live, work, love and make life worth living for all we meet. Men may be very learned, and still be far from wise. ”

“ As a rule, the world of humanity can be divided into two parts: the practical men and the searchers for truth. Usually the latter have nothing to lose but their head. Spinoza, Galileo, Bruno, Thomas Paine, Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, are the pure type. Then come Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson, crowded out of their pulpits, scorned by their Alma Mater, pitied by the public—yet holding true to their course. ”

“ Hypatia might have lived yesterday, and her death at the hands of a mob was an accident that might have occurred in Boston, where a respectable company once threw a rope around the neck of a good man and ran him through streets supposed to be sacred to liberty and free speech.
A mob is made up of cotton waste, saturated with oil, and a focused idea causes spontaneous combustion. Let a fire occur in almost any New York State village, and the town turns wrecker, and loot looms large in the limited brain of the villager. Civilization is a veneer. ”

“ Socrates comes to us through Plato. Various other contemporaries mention Socrates and quote him, some to his disadvantage, but it was left for Plato to give us the heart of his philosophy, and limn his character for all time in unforgetable outline.
Plato is called the "Pride of Greece." His contribution to the wealth of the world consists in the fact that he taught the joys of the intellect—the supreme satisfaction that comes through thinking. This is the pure Platonic philosophy: to find our gratifications in exalted thought and not in bodily indulgence. ”

“ Moses was a soldier, a diplomat, an executive, a writer, a teacher, a leader, a prophet, a stonecutter. Beside all these he was a farmer—a workingman, one who when forty years of age tended flocks and herds for a livelihood. Every phase of the outdoor life of the range was familiar to him. And the greatness of the man is revealed in the fact that his plans and aspirations were so far beyond his achievements that at last he thought he had failed. Exultant success seems to go with that which is cheap and transient. ”

“ The desire of Froebel was to educate the race, but what are a few hours a day in a schoolroom with a totally unsympathetic home environment!
To reach and interest the mother in the problem of education was well-nigh impossible. Toil, deprivation, poverty, had killed all the romance and enthusiasm in her heart. She was the victim of arrested development; but the little other-mother was a child, impressionable, immature, and she could be taught. The home must co-operate with the school, otherwise all the school can teach will be forgotten in the home. ”

“ If there is another world we better be getting ready for it. If heaven is an Ideal Republic it is founded on unselfishness, truth, reciprocity, equanimity and co-operation, and only those will be at home there who have practised these virtues here. Man was made for mutual service. This way lies Elysium.
Plato was a teacher of teachers, and like every other great teacher who has ever lived, his soul goes marching on, for to teach is to influence, and influence never dies. ”

“ Twenty-four centuries have passed since Socrates was put to death on the charge of speaking disrespectfully of the gods and polluting the minds of the youths of Athens. During ten of these centuries that have passed since then, the race lost the capacity to think, through the successful combination of the priest and the soldier. These men blocked human evolution. The penalty for making slaves is that you become one.
To suppress humanity is to suppress yourself. ”

“ A woman will be a woman, no matter what mask she wear, and she ought to be proud of her folly and make the most of it.
Is not Cupid, that first father of all religion, is not he stark blind, that he can not himself distinguish of colors, so he would make us as mope-eyed in judging falsely of all love concerns, and wheedle us into a thinking that we are always in the right? Thus every Jack sticks to his own Jill; every tinker esteems his own trull ”

“ Eddy's were to her.
My conscience is quite as sacred to me as hers was to her. And in being an agnostic I object to being classed as blind, stubborn, wilful, malicious and degenerate.
We should honor our Creator by cleaving to the things that seem to us to be true, and not abandon the rudder of our minds to any man or any woman, be they living or dead. Let us not be dishonest with ourselves, even to rid us of our physical diseases. As for health, I have all of it that Christian Science ever gave or can give. I have no "testimony" of healing to relate, for I have never been sick an hour. ”

“ Everybody knew Socrates—I guess so!
Plato, the handsome youth of nineteen, wearing a purple robe, which marked him as one of the nobility, paused to listen to this uncouth man who gave everything and wanted nothing.
Ye gods! But it is no wonder they caricatured him—he was a temptation too great to resist.
Plato smiled—he never laughed, being too well-bred for that. Then he sighed, and moved a little nearer in.
"Individuals are nothing. The State is all. To offend the State is to die. The State is an organization and we are members of it. The State is only as rich as its poorest citizen. ”

“ A college that has its students devote one-half their time to actual, useful work is so in line with commonsense that we are amazed that the idea had to be put into execution by the ex-slave as a life-saver for his disenfranchised race. Our great discoveries are always accidents: we work for one thing and get another. I expect that the day will come, and erelong, when the great universities of the world will have to put the Tuskegee Idea into execution in order to save themselves from being distanced by the Colored Race. ”

“ We help ourselves only as we advance the race—we are happy only as we minister to the whole. The race is one, and this is monism.
And here Socrates and Plato seemingly separate, for Socrates in his life wanted nothing, not even joy, and Plato's desire was for peace and happiness. Yet the ideal of justice in Plato's philosophy is very exalted.
No writer in that flowering time of beauty and reason which we call "The Age of Pericles" exerted so profound an influence as Plato. All the philosophers that follow him were largely inspired by him. ”

“ Fortune we still find favoring the blunt, and flushing the forward; strokes smooth up fools, crowning all their undertakings with success; but wisdom makes her followers bashful, sneaking and timorous, and therefore you commonly see that they are reduced to hard shifts; must grapple with poverty, cold and hunger; must lie recluse, despised, and unregarded; while fools roll in money, are advanced to dignities and offices, and in a word have the whole world at command. ”

“ From Plato you can prove that there is a life after this for each individual soul, as Francis of Assisi proved, or you can take your Plato, as did Hume, and show that man lives only in his influence, his individual life returning to the mass and becoming a part of all the great pulsing existence that ebbs and flows through plant and tree and flower and flying bird. And today we turn to Plato and find the corroboration of our thought that to live now and here, up to our highest and best, [Pg 122] is the acme of wisdom. We prepare to live by living. ”

“ It has been a frightfully bad education that the Negro has had—work distasteful, and work disgraceful! And [Pg 210] the slave-owner suffered most of all, for he came to regard work as debasing.
And now a Negro is teaching the Negro that work is beautiful—that work is a privilege—that only through willing service can he ever win his freedom. Architecture is fixed ecstasy, inspired always by a strong man who gives a feeling of security. Athens was an ecstasy in marble.
Tuskegee is an ecstasy in brick and mortar. ”

“ All formal religions have taught that to look for yourself was bad. The peephole through the roof of his garret cost Copernicus his liberty, but it was worth the price.
Plotinus made a study of all philosophies—all religions. He traveled through Egypt, Greece, Assyria, India. He became an "adept", and discovered how easily the priest drifts into priestcraft, and fraud steps in with legerdemain and miracle to amend the truth. As if to love humanity were not enough to recommend the man, they have him turn water into wine and walk on the water. ”

“ The soul of Erasmus revolted at life in a monastery. He hated the typical monks—their food, their ways of life, their sophistry, their stupidity. To turn glutton and welcome folly as a relief from religion, he said, was the most natural thing in the world, when men had once started in to lead an unnatural life. Good food, daintily served, only goes with a co-ed mental regimen. Men eat with their hands, out of a pot, unless women are present to enforce the decencies. Women alone are a little more to be pitied than men alone, if 't were possible. ”