Quotes from Elbert Hubbard

Life: An affirmative between two negatives.

Logic is one thing, and common sense another.

Midnight: The Pole of the hours; a pincushion on which sparkle all the seconds of a day.

Optimism... The instinct to lie.

Optimism... A kind of heart stimulant — the digitalis of failure.

Optimism... To whistle while passing a cemetery in the night; to sing a hymn while having a tooth pulled; to smile while being robbed.

Optimism... Fatty degeneration of intelligence.

No man that lives can satisfy everybody. The recipe for perfect peace is, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.

The preachers who preach the beauty of truth, honesty and a useful, helpful life, I am with, head, heart and hand. The preachers who declare that there can be no such thing as a beautiful life unless it will accept superstition, I am against, tooth, claw, club, tongue and pen.

A braver, finer, more representative, good old American sport I never knew than Charley Miller. He isn't talking about retiring from business and having a good time. He has a good time in his work.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed — it is a process of elimination.

A man is as good as he has to be, and a woman is as bad as she dares

The woman who cannot tell a lie in defense of her husband, is unworthy of the name of wife.

Yesterday woman was a chattel. Now she is, in law, a minor. Tomorrow she will be free, or partially so--that is to say, as free as man.

Live so to get the approbation of your Other Self, and success if yours. But pray that success will not come any faster than you are able to endure it.

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.

As a matter of recuperation the vacation does not recuperate, since as a rule, no man needs a vacation so much as the person who has just had one.

The man who is so run down that he needs a vacation can never adjust or reform himself in two weeks. What he really needs is to reform his life.

The greatest mistake you can make in this life is to be continually fearing you will make one.

What we all need is enough vacation every day so that we can face each morning with health sufficient to do our work in gladness. That is to say, we need enough of a play-spell every day to keep us in good physical condition.

"A merry laugh doeth good like a medicine," said Solomon a thousand years before Christ. And today if we laughed more we would need medicine less. Aye, if we mixed laughter, love and work in the right proportion, medicine would be but a dream of things that once were.

Perfume: any smell that is used to drown out a worse one.

Be pleasant until ten o'clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.