Life & Wisdom Quote by Elbert Hubbard

The insult lands softly, then lingers: Hubbard isn’t praising boredom so much as puncturing our addiction to spectacle. “Extraordinary” reads like a carnival word, a headline word, a word that promises escape from the tedious discipline of paying attention. By contrast, “the commonplace” sounds like dishwater until you notice the dare embedded in it: only a “great mind” can look at ordinary life without needing it to dress up as drama.

Hubbard’s intent is partly moral and partly aesthetic. Moral, because he’s drawing a hierarchy of attention: chasing miracles, gossip, and oddities is framed as intellectual laziness, a kind of mental tourism. Aesthetic, because he’s championing a harder craft: extracting meaning from what everyone else walks past. The subtext is that greatness isn’t a lightning strike of genius; it’s a trained willingness to sit with the obvious long enough to see its structure. That’s why the line works rhetorically: it flips the status symbols. Instead of celebrating the rare, it treats the everyday as the real proving ground.

Context matters. Hubbard made his name as a turn-of-the-century American tastemaker and self-improvement impresario, writing aphorisms designed to travel - on paper, in speeches, in people’s pockets. The Gilded Age was noisy with new media, mass entertainment, and industrial awe; “extraordinary” was becoming a commodity. Hubbard’s epigram sells a counter-status: sophistication as restraint. It’s also a tidy piece of gatekeeping, implying that if you’re drawn to the sensational, the problem isn’t the world’s cheap thrills - it’s your mind.