Elbert Hubbard

“ Man's very body is drawn from the land. Children of the soil, we come from the land, and to the land we must return. Take away from man all that belongs to the land, and what have you but a disembodied spirit? Therefore, he who holds the land on which and from which another man must live is that man's master; and the man is his slave. The man who holds the land on which I must live, can command me to life or to death just as absolutely as though I were his chattel. Talk about abolishing slavery! We have not abolished slavery; we have only abolished one rude form of it—chattel slavery. ”

“ It will be seen, from these frank outpourings of the heart, that Madame Guyon was suffering from an overwrought sex-nature.
Steeped in superstition, hypersthenia, God to her was a man—her lover.
Her one thought was to do His will. God is her ideal of all that is strong, powerful and farseeing. In her imagination she continually communicates with this all-powerful man. She calls Him "My Love," and occasionally forgetting herself addresses him as "Sir." She evades her husband, and deceives that worthy gentleman into believing she is asleep when she is all the time secretly praying to God. ”

“ Lassalle. [Changing his tactics] Your husband is a gentleman, I trust. And you—are the mother of the lady I love, so I will resent nothing you say. You speak only in a passion, and not from your heart. I resent nothing.
Frau Von Donniges. A man spotted with every vice says he loves my daughter! Your love is pollution. My ears are closed to you—you may stand and grimace and insult me, but I hear you not. Go!
Lassalle. Very well, I will go and see Helene's father. Men may dislike each other—they may be enemies, but they do not spit on each other. If they fight, they fight courteously. ”

“ In her perverted selfness, all things have relationship to her own ego, and so she is in continual trouble, like a girl whose love is being opposed by parents and kinsmen.
A woman in love is the most unreasonable of all created things—next to a man. Reason is actually beyond a lover's orbit. This woman has lost the focus of truth, and all things are out of perspective. Every object is twisted and distorted by the one thought that fills her life. Lovers are fools, but Nature makes them so. ”

“ Marriage was an expediency. Dante, Petrarch and Shakespeare live only because they loved.
Literature, music, sculpture, painting, constitute art—not, however, all of art. And art is a secondary sexual manifestation. Beauty is the child of married minds, and Emerson says, "Beauty is the seal of approval that Nature sets upon Virtue."
So, if you please, love and virtue are one, and a lapse from virtue is a lapse from love. It is love that vitalizes the intellect to the creative point. So it will be found that men with the creative faculty have always been lovers. ”

“ This kind of love, carried on discreetly, is on every hand, warming into life the divine germs of art, poetry and philosophy. Of it the world seldom hears. It creates no scandal, never is mentioned in court proceedings, nor is it featured by the newspapers. Indeed, the love of Dante would have been written in water, were it not for the fact that the poet took the world into his confidence, as all poets do—for literature is only confession. ”

“ By love's alchemy we will gild each hour and day, so it will be a time of joyous hope, and life will be a continual feast-day. And so through the desire and effort to express, we will reach the highest good, or paradise.
Petrarch did not live this ideal life of love and service—he only dreamed it. But his dream is a prophecy—all desire is a promise. We double our joys by sharing them, and the life for the Other Self seems a psychological need. Man is only in process of creation. We have not traveled far; we are only just learning to walk, and so we sometimes stumble and fall. ”

“ Rossetti hanging there on the same hooks with Rossetti's raiment. Rossetti made apology for the seeming confusion and said, "You see, if I did not find traces of her all over the house I should surely die."
A year after the death of his wife Rossetti painted the wonderful "Beata Beatrix," a portrait of Beatrice sitting in a balcony overlooking Florence. The beautiful eyes filled with ache, dream and expectation are closed as if in a transport of calm delight. An hourglass is at hand and a dove is just dropping a poppy, the flower of sleep and death, into her open hands. ”

“ The silly woman is one who has always had her own way, and is intent on conquest as Chronos appropriates her charms and gives bulk for beauty.
The drudge is only a drudge, and her compensation lies in the fact that she seldom knows it.
Madame De Berney had been disillusioned, and intellectual desire was glowing with a steady, mellow light. She wanted to know and to be. And shooting through space comes Balzac, a vagrant comet, and their orbits being the same, their masses unite and continue in one course, bowled by the Infinite. ”

“ People whose souls are made of dawnstuff and starshine may make mistakes, but God will not judge them by these alone. But for the love of Lady Hamilton Nelson would probably never have lived to fight Trafalgar—one of the pivotal battles of the world.
Nelson saved England from the fell clutch of the Corsican, and Lady Hamilton saved Nelson from insanity and death. Nelson knew how to do three great things—how to fight, how to love, how to die. ”

“ Lassalle. That you might be disillusioned!
Helene. Precisely so.
Lassalle. How interesting! And how superfluous in your fairy prince.
Helene. He is an extraordinary man, for he said I should see you and him both, see you together and take my choice.
Lassalle. Good! He is a Christian, and does as he would be done by. I am a Christianized Jew, and I will bejew all Christendom. Your prince is a useless appendenda, and I would kill him, were it not that I am opposed to duelling. I fought one duel—or did not fight it, I should say. I faced my man, he fired and missed. ”

“ Madame Guyon came under the sway of Father La Combe's eloquence. She felt the deep, abiding strength of his character. He was the first genuine man she had ever met, and in degree he filled her ideal. She sought him in confession, and the quality of her confession must surely have made an impression on him. Spirituality and sex are closely akin. Oratory and a well-sexed nature go together.
Father La Combe was a man. Madame Guyon was a woman.
Both were persons of high intellect, great purity of purpose, and sincerity of intent. But neither knew that piety is a by-product of sex. ”

“ For aught we know, the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable Girl clothed in a poet's fancy. Fortunate, indeed, was Dante that he never knew her well enough to get undeceived, and so walked through life in love with love, sensitive, saintly, sweetly sad and divinely happy in his melancholy.
[Pg 117] There be simple folks and many, who think that the tragedy of love lies in its being unrequited.
The fact is, the only genuinely unhappy love—the only tragedy—is when love wears itself out. ”

“ Power that is earned is never ridiculous, but power in the hands of one who is strange to it is first funny, then fussy, and soon pathetic. Punk is a useful substance, and only serves as metaphor when it tries to pass for bronze.
So, then, behold Katharine O'Shea—handsome, wistful, winsome, vivacious and intelligent, with a brain as keen as that of Becky Sharp, yet as honest as Amelia—getting her husband transferred from the army to the civil list. ”

“ In passing, let us note the fact that the doughty Thomas was not a lover, and he more than once growled out his gratitude in that he had never lost either his head or his heart, for men congratulate themselves on everything they have, even their limitations. Thomas Carlyle was not a lover.
A great passion is a trinitarian affair. And I sometimes have thought it a matter of regret, as well as of wonder, that a strong man did not appear on the scene and fall in love with the winsome Jeannie Welsh. ”

“ She is ubiquitous, omniscient and omnipresent—is the Disagreeable Girl. She is a disappointment to her father, a humiliation to her mother, a pest to brothers and sisters, and when she finally marries, she saps the inspiration of her husband and often converts a proud and ambitious man into a weak and cowardly cur.
Only in society does the Disagreeable Girl shine: everywhere else she is an abject failure. ”

“ The book compiled after his death entitled, "Poems on the Life and Death of Laura," forms a mine of love and allusion that served poets and lovers in good stead for three hundred years, and which has now been melted down and passed into the current coin of every tongue. It was his love-nature that made Petrarch sing, and it was his love-poems that make his name immortal. He expressed for us the undying, eternal dream of a love where the man and woman shall live together as one in their hopes, thoughts, deeds and desires; where they shall work for each other; live for each other ”

“ Love like that of Dante still exists everywhere, and will until the end of time. One-sided loves are classic and know neither age nor place; and to a degree—let the fact be stated softly and never hereafter be so much as whispered—all good men and women have at some time loved one-sidedly, the beloved being as unaware of the love as a star is of the astronomer who discovers it. ”

“ I know a successful businessman in Saint Louis, an owner of monopolies, on the profits of which he plays at being a Socialist. This man knows that if he could succeed in bringing about the things he advocates it would work his ruin.
He elocutes to the gallery of his cosmic self, for the ego is a multi-masked rascal and plays I-Spy and leap-frog with himself the livelong day.
Had the love of Petrarch and Laura ever gone to the point of executive session, he would straightway have ceased to write about it, and literature would have been the loser. ”

“ Formerly it was by self-surrender; but in her present state it is without even knowing or understanding what she does, like a child whom its mother might hold over the waves of a disturbed sea, and who fears nothing, because it neither sees nor knows the danger; or like a madman who casts himself into the sea without fear of destroying himself. It is not that exactly, for to cast one's self is an "own" action, which here the soul is without. ”

“ Balzac was dumb with rage, then tears came to his relief, and he cried as a child cries for its mother. The first paroxysm passed, anger took the place of grief: he found time to realize that perhaps there were other women besides La Dilecta—possibly there were other Dilectas. She had struck a blow at his pride—the only blow, in fact, he ever received.
Among Balzac's various correspondents—for successful men always get letters from sympathetic unknowns—was one Madame Hanska, in far-off Poland. ”

“ This type of woman is never commonplace—she is the victim of her qualities; and these qualities in the case of Madame Guyon were high ambition, great intellect, impelling passion, self-reliance. Had she been less of a woman she would have been more.
She thinks mostly of herself, and intense selfishness is apparent even in her humility. The tragedy of her life lay in that she had a surplus of time and a plethora of money, and these paved the way for introspection and fatty enlargement of the ego. ”

“ The Englishman coming to America speaks a different language from ours—his allusions, symbols, aphorisms belong to another sphere. He does not understand us, nor we him. But Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne must have been "universals," for they never really had to get acquainted: they loved the same things, spoke a common language, and best of all recognized that what we call "life" isn't life at the last, and that an anxious stirring, clutching for place, pelf and power is not nearly so good in results as to play the flute, tell stories and keep house just for fun. ”

“ Some picture courts and kings; others reveal to us beggars, peasants and those who struggle for bread; still others give charming views of children; [Pg 302] while all men and women in love write love-stories; but you know every possible condition that can come to a human soul, and so you seem the only person who ever has written or could write the complete 'Human Comedy' in which every type of man, woman or child who ever lived shall have his part."
No wonder Balzac loved Madame Hanska—what writer would not love a woman who could place him on such a pedestal! ”

“ The hope of the world lies in the middle class—the rich are as ignorant as the poverty-stricken. A way must be devised to reach the rich—I can do it. Inaction, idleness, that is the curse. Life is fluid, and only running water is pure. Stagnation is death. Turbulent Rome was healthy, but quiescent Rome was soft, feverish, morbid, pathological. Now, take Hamlet—what man ever had more opportunities? Heir to the throne—beauty, power, youth, intellect—all were his! ”