Love, Life and Work - How To Attain The Highest Happiness For One´s Self With The Least Possible Harm To Others
Love, Life & Work
Being a Book of Opinions Reasonably Good-Natured Concerning
How to Attain the Highest Happiness for One's Self with the
Least Possible Harm to Others
Elbert Hubbard
Love, Life and Work by Elbert Hubbard
is a book on how to attain the highest happiness
for one's self with the least possible harm to others. It shows harmonious living as the key to personal success and empowerment. Among the methods the author
suggests are prayer, religious revival, positive mental attitude and religious observances.
CONTENTS
CHAPTERS
1. A Prayer
2. Life and Expression
3. Time and Chance
4. Psychology of a Religious Revival
5. One-Man Power
6. Mental Attitude
7. The Outsider
8. Get Out or Get in Line
9. The Week-Day, Keep it Holy
10. Exclusive Friendships
11. The Folly of Living in the Future
12. The Spirit of Man
13. Art and Religion
14. Initiative
15. The Disagreeable Girl
16. The Neutral
17. Reflections on Progress
18. Sympathy, Knowledge and Poise
19. Love and Faith
20. Giving Something for Nothing
21. Work and Waste
22. The Law of Obedience
23. Society's Saviors
24. Preparing for Old Age
25. An Alliance With Nature
26. The Ex. Question
27. The Sergeant
28. The Spirit of the Age
29. The Grammarian
30. The Best Religion
Book Excerpts:
Life and Expression
By exercise of its faculties the spirit grows, just as a muscle grows
strong thru continued use. Expression is necessary. Life is expression, and repression is stagnation--death.
Yet, there can be right and wrong expression. If a man permits his life
to run riot and only the animal side of his nature is allowed to express
itself, he is repressing his highest and best, and the qualities not
used atrophy and die.
Men are punished by their sins, not for them. Sensuality, gluttony, and the life of license repress the life of the spirit, and the soul never blossoms; and this is what it is to lose one's soul.
All adown the centuries thinking men have noted these truths, and again and again we find individuals forsaking in horror the life of the senses and devoting themselves to the life of the spirit.
This question of expression through the spirit, or through the senses--through soul or body--has been the pivotal point of all philosophy and the inspiration of all religion.
Every religion is made up of two elements that never mix any more than
oil and water mix. A religion is a mechanical mixture, not a chemical
combination, of morality and dogma.
Dogma is the science of the unseen: the doctrine of the unknown and unknowable. And in order to give this science plausibility, its promulgators have always fastened upon it morality.
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.