Elbert Hubbard

“ Isn't good work an effort to produce a useful, necessary or beautiful thing? If so, good work is a prayer, prompted by a loving heart—a prayer to benefit and bless. If prayer is not a desire, backed up by a right human effort to bring about its efficacy, then what is it?
Work is a service performed for ourselves and others. If I love you I will surely work for you—in this way I reveal my love. And to manifest my love in this manner is a joy and gratification to me. Thus work is for the worker alone and labor is its own reward. ”

“ The business that is not progressive is sowing the seeds of its own dissolution. Life is a movement forward, and all things in nature that are not evolving into something better are preparing to return into their constituent elements. One general rule for progress in big business concerns is the introduction of new blood. You must keep step with the business world. If you lag behind, the outlaws that hang on the flanks of commerce will cut you out and take you captive, just as the wolves lie in wait for the sick cow of the plains. ”

“ You are not free yourself, and you insist that others shall not be free.
You have ceased to make work gladsome, and you toil and make others toil with you, and you all well nigh faint from weariness and disgust. You are slave and slave-owner, for to own slaves is to be one.
But the artist is free and he works in joy, and to him all things are good and all days are holy. The great inventors, thinkers, poets, musicians and artists have all been men of deep religious natures; but their religion has never been a formalized, restricted, ossified religion. ”

“ Every man who has had anything to do with communal life has noticed that the clique is the disintegrating bacillus—and the clique has its rise always in the exclusive friendship of two persons of the same sex, who tell each other all unkind things that are said of each other—"so be on your guard." Beware of the exclusive friendship! Respect all men and try to find the good in all. To associate only with the sociable, the witty, the wise, the brilliant, is a blunder—go among the plain, the stupid, the uneducated, and exercise your own wit and wisdom. ”

“ A goodly dash of indifference is a requisite in the formula for doing a great work.
No one knows what the Goal is—we are all sailing under sealed orders.
Do your work to-day, doing it the best you can, and live one day at a time. The man that does this is conserving his God-given energy, and not spinning it out into tenuous spider threads so fragile and filmy that unkind Fate will probably brush it away.
To do your work well to-day, is the certain preparation for something better to-morrow. The past has gone from us forever; the future we cannot reach; the present alone is ours. ”

“ Every employer is constantly looking for people who can help him; naturally he is on the lookout among his employees for those who do not help, and everything and everybody that is a hindrance has to go. This is the law of trade—do not find fault with it; it is founded on nature. The reward is only for the man who helps, and in order to help you must have sympathy.
You cannot help the Old Man so long as you are explaining in an undertone and whisper, by gesture and suggestion, by thought and mental attitude that he is a curmudgeon and that his system is dead wrong. ”

“ These things being true, if it is wrong to work on Sunday, it is wrong to love on Sunday; every smile is a sin, every caress a curse, and all tenderness a crime.
Must there not come a time, if we grow in mentality and spirit, when we shall cease to differentiate and quit calling some work secular and some sacred? Isn't it as necessary for me to hoe corn and feed my loved ones (and also the priest) as for the priest to preach and pray? Would any priest ever preach and pray if somebody didn't hoe? If life is from God, then all useful effort is divine; and to work is the highest form of religion. ”

“ If you would have friends, cultivate solitude instead of society. Drink in the ozone; bathe in the sunshine; and out in the silent night, under the stars, say to yourself again and yet again, "I am a part of all my eyes behold!" And the feeling then will come to you that you are no mere interloper between earth and heaven; but you are a necessary part of the whole. No harm can come to you that does not come to all, and if you shall go down it can only be amid a wreck of worlds. ”

“ When we become fearful, the judgment is as unreliable as the compass of a ship whose hold is full of iron ore; when we hate, we have unshipped the rudder; and if ever we stop to meditate on what the gossips say, we have allowed a hawser to foul the screw.
Keep your mind on the great and splendid thing you would like to do; and then, as the days go gliding by, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the elements that it needs. ”

“ I prophesy a day when business and education will be synonymous—when commerce and college will join hands—when the preparation for life will be to go to work.
As long as trade was trickery, business barter, commerce finesse, government exploitation, slaughter honorable, and murder a fine art; when religion was ignorant superstition, piety the worship of a fetich and education a clutch for honors, there was small hope for the race. ”

“ Now one might suppose that he is an absolute tyrant, but a good sergeant is a beneficent tyrant at the right time. To break the spirit of his men will not do—it would unfit them for service—so what he seeks to do is merely to bend their minds so as to match his own. Gradually they grow to both love and fear him. In time of actual fight he transforms cowards into heroes. He holds his men up to the scratch. ”

“ If you work for a man, in heaven's name work for him.
If he pays you wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for him—speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and stand by the institution that he represents.
I think if I worked for a man, I would work for him. I would not work for him a part of the time, and the rest of the time work against him. I would give an undivided service or none. If put to the pinch, an ounce of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness. ”

“ Socialism is a Trust of Trusts.
Humanity is growing in intellect, in patience, in kindness—in love. And when the time is ripe, the people will step in and take peaceful possession of their own, and the Coöperative Commonwealth will give to each one his due.
Sympathy, Knowledge and Poise
Sympathy, Knowledge and Poise seem to be the three ingredients that are most needed in forming the Gentle Man. I place these elements according to their value. No man is great who does not have Sympathy plus, and the greatness of men can be safely gauged by their sympathies. ”

“ That the possession of wealth can never make a man exempt from useful manual labor; that if all would work a little, no one would then be overworked; that if no one wasted, all would have enough; that if none were overfed, none would be underfed; that the rich and "educated" need education quite as much as the poor and illiterate; that the presence of a serving class is an indictment and a disgrace to our civilization; that the disadvantage of having a serving class falls most upon those who are served, and not upon those who serve—just as the real curse of slavery fell upon the slave-owners. ”

“ When you do a splendid piece of work and express your best, there comes to you, as reward, an exaltation of soul, a sublimity of feeling that puts you for the time being in touch with the Infinite. A formal religion brings this feeling without your doing anything useful, therefore it is unnatural.
Formalized religion is the strongest where sin, slavery, tyranny and ignorance abound. Where men are free, enlightened and at work, they find all the gratification in their work that their souls demand—they cease to hunt outside themselves for something to give them rest. ”

“ Will there not come a time when all men and women will work because it is a blessed gift—a privilege? Then, if all worked, wasteful consuming as a business would cease. As it is, there are many people who do not work at all, and these pride themselves upon it and uphold the Sunday laws. If the idlers would work, nobody would be overworked. If this time ever comes shall we not cease to regard it as "wicked" to work at certain times, just as much as we would count it absurd to pass a law making it illegal for us to be happy on Wednesday? ”

“ So there came a time when Hooker was superseded by a Silent Man, who criticised no one, railed at nobody—not even the enemy.
And this Silent Man, who could rule his own spirit, took the cities. He minded his own business, and did the work that no man can ever do unless he constantly gives absolute loyalty, perfect confidence, unswerving fidelity and untiring devotion. Let us mind our own business, and allow others to mind theirs, thus working for self by working for the good of all. ”

“ Morality can and does exist entirely separate and apart from dogma, but dogma is ever a parasite on morality, and the business of the priest is to confuse the two.
But morality and religion never saponify. Morality is simply the question of expressing your life forces—how to use them? You have so much energy; and what will you do with it? And from out the multitude there have always been men to step forward and give you advice for a consideration. Without their supposed influence with the unseen we might not accept their interpretation of what is right and wrong. ”

“ But Knowledge must go with Sympathy, else the emotions will become maudlin and pity may be wasted on a poodle instead of a child; on a field-mouse instead of a human soul. Knowledge in use is wisdom, and wisdom implies a sense of values—you know a big thing from a little one, a valuable fact from a trivial one. Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value: a little misfit in life makes us laugh, a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.
Poise is the strength of body and strength of mind to control your Sympathy and your Knowledge. ”

“ Doctor Chapman wants all men to act alike and believe alike, not realizing that progress is the result of individuality, and so long as a man thinks, whether he is right or wrong, he is making head. Neither does he realize that wrong thinking is better than no thinking at all, and that the only damnation consists in ceasing to think, and accepting the conclusions of another. Final truths and final conclusions are wholly unthinkable to sensible people in their sane moments, but these revivalists wish to sum up truth for all time and put their leaden seal upon it. ”

“ For the woman who has loved much society has but one verdict: crucify her! The best and the worst are hanged on one tree.
In the abandon of a great love there exists a godlike quality which places a woman very close to the holy of holies, yet such a one, not having complied with the edicts of society, is thrust unceremoniously forth, and society, Pilate-like, washes its hands in innocency.
Preparing for Old Age
Socrates was once asked by a pupil, this question: "What kind of people shall we be when we reach Elysium?" ”

“ But the spirit of man is not fully at home here; as we grow in soul and intellect, we hear, and hear again, a voice which says: "Arise and get thee hence, for this is not thy rest." And the greater and nobler and more sublime the spirit, the more constant is the discontent. Discontent may come from various causes, so it will not do to assume that the discontented ones are always the pure in heart, but it is a fact that the wise and excellent have all known the meaning of world-weariness. ”

“ The people about Ivan are in mortal terror of him, for he is still the absolute monarch—he has the power to promote or disgrace, to take their lives or let them go free. They laugh when he laughs, cry when he does, and watch his fleeting moods with thumping hearts.
He is intensely religious and affects the robe and cowl of a priest. Around his neck hangs the crucifix. His fear is that he will die with no opportunity of confession and absolution. He prays to High Heaven every moment, kisses the cross, and his toothless old mouth interjects prayers to God and curses on man in the same breath. ”

“ Yesterday she was a slave, sold in a Circassian mart, and freedom to her is so new and strange that she is unfamiliar with her environment, and she does not know what to do with it.
The tragedy she works, according to George Bernard Shaw, is through the fact that very often good men, blinded by the glamour of sex, imagine they love the Disagreeable Girl, when what they love is their own ideal—an image born in their own minds.
Nature is both a trickster and a humorist, and ever sets the will of the species beyond the discernment of the individual. ”