Selected Quotes of L. Ron Hubbard

"The only thing which can actually alter self-determinism and reduce it is self-determinism itself. One can determine to be used or worked upon by the environ and its people. But until one makes a determination to do so, one is not so affected."

"There is little joy to be found in gloomy, restrained solemnity. When some of old made it seem that to practice virtue required a grim and dismal sort of life, they tended to infer that all pleasure came from being wicked: nothing could be further from the facts. Joy and pleasure do not come from immorality! Quite the reverse! Joy and pleasure arise only in honest hearts: the immoral lead unbelievably tragic lives filled with suffering and pain. The human virtues have little to do with gloominess. They are the bright face of life itself."

"Man is on the high road at last. Because all of the evils of Man come from Man's effort to deny freedom to Man. His lack of culture is most apparent where slavery has the greatest root.
"And where you have men who are free, they can do a lot of things. Work becomes a pleasure. The handling of effort itself becomes a very desirable activity. And things get built, the world becomes more beautiful. Man is able to engage in life as a game rather than as a slavery.
"And so we get another culture."

"But what do you mean, 'True to yourself'? Actually, you're not being true to yourself, you're being true to your basic purpose. If you're not true to your basic purpose, you've had it."

"But it's simply: Living is having and following a purpose. That's all. That's the formula of life - have and follow a purpose. That's it. If you do it, you're living and if you don't do it, you're not living. And that's all there is to it. I've now given you the basic fundamental of existence and that really is it."

"Livingness is going along a certain course, impelled by a purpose and with some place to arrive. It consists mostly of removing the barriers in the channel, holding the edges firm, ignoring the distractions and reinforcing and reimpelling one's progress along the channel. That's life..."

"Fortunately, Man only changes in the direction of the zenith. He only changes in the direction of the stars. And he never changes in the direction of the snake pits. Maybe he's just cussed enough to know this basically, down deep somewhere. Maybe he's just ornery enough to feel that he's gone far enough south at any time he's gone south at all. And maybe the only direction he's left open is the stars."

"If we were just to engage lightly and mildly on bringing better communication across the world, and particularly communication into areas of turbulence, and not care occasionally when you get a little explosion or kickback but keep talking, it just might be that the entire situation might clarify nicely and neatly. Because you're bringing greater freedom to the world."

"To really know life you've got to be part of life. You must get down and look, you must get into the nooks and crannies of existence. You have to rub elbows with all kinds and types of men before you can finally establish what he is."

"A culture is held together solely and only by education. Whether that education is accomplished by experience or by teaching, a culture as a whole is the summation of its education."

"Freedom of truth is something Man has not been noted for. He's not been noted for this at all. He's been noted quite the contrary for a slavery of something somebody said was true. And that is a vastly different thing than freedom of truths."

"These great spiritual leaders have been hanged, reviled, misinterpreted, badly quoted, have not been at all comprehended, but nevertheless, they are the hands through which a torch has been handed forward through the centuries so that we could culminate with a greater ability for Man and some hope for his future."

"What is a game? A game is an activity engaged upon by one or more individuals in order to maintain his interest in communication in life."

"Trying to find out why you tick, why you're as right as you are, why you function at all, why you think at all, would be quite an adventure."

"Let's say that the soul is life, is the spirit, is the thinkingness, is the awareness or any such term which communicates to you the meaning of life and vitality."

"If you were going to put some life back into society, if you were to put the society back together again so that it did have some wish to survive, if you were going to make life a little bit better, really all you'd have to do would be to put Man a little more in control of his actions and reactions."

"If the world around him is bad, then he is unwilling to grant life. If the world around him he conceives to be good, he is willing to grant life to it. A world with life granted to it runs well. A world with no life granted to it goes into chaos and disappears. Now, this is the riddle of the centuries."

"I admit that some man occasionally will become afraid and will become totally gripped by the belief that there is menace in every fellow man. I admit that a human being can become so aberrated as to constitute a menace to the bulk of the society and that in such a case it is necessary to reacquaint him with society. But I will not admit that there is a naturally bad, evil man on Earth."

"Tyrannies are sown at times when nobody is very watchful, where everybody has a full stomach, where everything is calm, nothing much appears on the surface. And then tyrannies show up and become very obvious when individuals, growing a little hungrier, a little less possessed of production, suddenly notice that there is somebody saying they mustn't talk, somebody saying they mustn't have opinions."

"The reason life is life and people are together and grass grows and trees grow and apparently the rain falls and everything else, is because it helps somebody."

"Where a society is composed of people who are capable of bringing order into their affairs and into the society, into their groups, we of course have a stable society. We don't have a chaos."

"The simplicity of observation, the simplicity of communication itself and only itself, is functional and will take Man from the bottom to the top. And the only thing I am trying to teach you is look."

"There is no short stop on the road to truth. That is the only track that you have to go all the way on. Once you have put your feet upon that road, you have to walk to its end. Otherwise, all manner of difficulties and upsets will beset you."

"We're talking about what life does best: it waves its magic wand and says 'be' or 'live' or 'exist' and things do. And that's what life does."

"You can make any marriage stick or you can recover any facet of any marriage or plaster one back together again any way you want to. It takes a little doing and it takes a little guts.
And that's an understatement if I ever made one."

"Real success is finding your lifework in the work that you love." - David McCullough

Are You Losing Your Soul?

By Alexander Green

I recently bumped into an old acquaintance I hadn't seen in years. "Are you still managing money?" he asked.

"No, I write investment advice now," I said.

"Well, it must not be panning out too well," he said with a wink, "or you wouldn't still be working!"

I've heard variations of this line over the years. And while it's always offered in jest, it hints at a particular mindset: Why would anyone continue to work if he didn't have to?

Yet I'd be bored to death without a job -- and even more of a pain in the neck to everyone around me, I'm sure. (Warren Buffett and Bill Gates -- two gentlemen who have a few dollars -- apparently feel the same way.)

According to more than 40 Gallup studies, three-quarters of us are disengaged from our jobs. The most recent U.S. Job Retention Survey found that more than 60 percent of employees are currently searching for new employment opportunities.

It's odd that we spend most of our waking hours at work -- in occupations often chosen by our younger selves -- and seldom ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations really mean.

When we meet someone new, the question we most frequently ask -- after discerning where they're from and whether we have any common acquaintances -- is "What do you do?"

Our work, to a great extent, defines us.

It wasn't always this way.

Three hundred years ago, Voltaire argued that work exists to save us from three great evils: boredom, poverty, and vice. But, as a society, we have since put our belief in two great ideas: romantic love and meaningful work.

Historically, our faith in these two ideas grew up together. We started to think that we should marry for love at roughly the same time as we started to think that we should work not only for money but for self-fulfillment.

These are beautiful ideals, but rarely can they be pursued without hitting a rough patch. And the pain can be immense. When we are without work -- as 29 million Americans are today -- we lose more than income; we are cut off from an identity. We can no longer explain what we do -- and, hence, who we are.

It's always a shame to see a person's talents wasted. And that's just as true for those who are employed but disengaged.

Ideally, your work should allow you to take the best of what's in you and express it to the world. It should give your life dignity and meaning, whether you're writing software, fixing teeth, or just raising happy, productive kids.

No matter how you spend your days, you have a clear choice. You can think of your work entirely in terms of responsibilities and obligations. Or you can view it as a contest, a challenge, an opportunity. Because if you don't enjoy what you're doing, there's little chance your work will please or impress anyone else.

I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of folks who are unhappy at work tend to equate a "good job" entirely with money, benefits, and security, rather than whether it allows them to express their talents.

Big mistake. Yet even those who recognize the dead-end nature of their current position are often reluctant to change. Why? Reasons vary, but some are so caught up in the pursuit of status, display, and material possessions that they've put themselves in a bind.

Choosing meaningful employment often means accepting at least a temporary pay cut. But that isn't always possible if you have a big mortgage, hefty car payments, or a lifestyle that keeps you two payments from the edge. Ironically, giving up the dream of "having it all" is often the first step in the right direction.

The other reason so many remain stuck in unsuitable work -- whether they admit it to themselves or not -- is fear.

Fear whispers that, even if you reduce your overhead, you won't be able to make it work financially. Fear betrays you, insisting that you're being unrealistic, that you don't have the heart, the talent, or the discipline to see it through, that doing work you love is reserved for someone else.

It's not true. One of the best prizes that life offers is the chance to work hard at something worth doing. Think enthusiastically about how you spend your days and you'll put a touch of glory in your life.

This is true for retirees, too. A life of meaning generally comes from finding a way to either increase the pleasure or decrease the suffering of your fellow humans, whether you're compensated for it or not.

Even if you're still in the workforce and -- due to circumstances -- tied to a job that is less than fulfilling, there are ways to use your talents in meaningful ways.

A few years ago, for instance, the AARP asked some attorneys if they would offer basic services to needy retirees at $30 an hour. They said no. But then AARP's program manager had a brilliant idea: He asked the lawyers if they would offer their services to needy retirees for free. Overwhelmingly, they said yes.

How could zero money be more attractive than $30 an hour? The original offer seemed insulting to some, a request for legal services at below-market wages. But when the request was reframed as volunteer work -- and therefore meaningful -- most were happy to oblige.

In Zen and the Art of Making a Living, Laurence G. Boldt writes, "Without self-expression, life lacks spontaneity and joy. Without service to others, it lacks meaning and purpose.... Conceiving of ourselves as artists in whatever work we do gives us a metaphor for a life of integrity, service, enjoyment, and excellence.... I know of no better nutshell statement of the path to finding one's true calling in life than the simple formula given by Aristotle: 'Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation.' These two, your talents and the needs of the world, are the great wake-up calls to your true vocation in life. To ignore either is, in some sense, to lose your soul."

You'll find that the happiest, most engaged individuals are those who are deeply involved in their workplace or community (or both), even if their time is unpaid.

Work is the natural outlet for our energy and enthusiasm. What could be more copacetic than to love what you do and feel that it matters?

After all, the highest reward for your work is not what you get, but what you become.

[Ed. Note: Alexander Green, Investment Director of The Oxford Club, has more than 20 years of experience as a research analyst, investment advisor, financial writer, and portfolio manager. He is the author of The Secret of Shelter Island: Money and What Matters, as well as the editor of "Spiritual Wealth," a free e-letter about the pursuit of the good life.

Alex is an expert panelist with the Liberty Street League, ETR's exclusive club based on the principles of self-determination and self-responsibility. The League is dedicated to helping members take advantage of under-the-radar, off Wall Street, wealth-building opportunities, including precious metals, Internet businesses, fine art, commodities, real estate, and much more. As a member, the League will also help you keep your money safe from the prying eyes of the government and financial organizations that don't have your interests at heart.]

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Today's Words That Work: Copacetic
Copacetic (koh-puh-SET-ik) -- a word with obscure origins -- means fine, completely satisfactory.

Example (as used by Alexander Green today): "Work is the natural outlet for our energy and enthusiasm. What could be more copacetic than to love what you do and feel that it matters?"

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These articles appear courtesy of Early to Rise [Issue #3051, 06-29-10], the Internet's most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/.

"Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all" - Abraham Lincoln

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized." - Sun Tzu

"It is not the magnitude of our actions, but the amount of love that is put into them, that matters."
-- Mother Teresa

"Life is just a mirror, and what you see out there, you must first see inside of you" - Wally 'Famous' Amos

"The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive edge." - Arie de Geus

"If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it."

"Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better."

- Albert Einstein