Love Quote by Elbert Hubbard

Hubbard sells generosity the way an early 20th-century entrepreneur sells a self-improvement system: as a paradox that snaps shut like a mousetrap. “Love grows by giving” sounds like folk wisdom, but the line is engineered for an America newly fluent in markets, exchange, and self-making. Love isn’t framed as a scarce resource to hoard; it’s a kind of capital whose value compounds only when circulated. The sly move is that it flatters both saint and striver: you get to be virtuous and practical at the same time.

The repetition - “give away,” “keep,” “retain” - isn’t accidental. Hubbard is arguing against the possessive model of affection (the lover as owner, the family as fortress) by borrowing the language of property to undermine it. He concedes the listener’s fear upfront: that giving means losing. Then he reverses the ledger. The only “love we keep” is not what we clutch but what we enact. Subtext: love is less a feeling than a practice, and the self isn’t protected by boundaries so much as built through outward motion.

Context matters. Hubbard, a Roycroft movement impresario as much as a writer, lived amid Progressive Era moral uplift and the gospel of efficiency. His aphorism doubles as social instruction: communities don’t cohere through private intensity; they cohere through visible, repeated acts of care. It’s also a quiet rebuke to romantic scarcity narratives. Love doesn’t die from being spent. It dies from being treated like a possession.