Life & Wisdom Quote by Elbert Hubbard

Hubbard’s line lands because it flatters itself as common sense while quietly skewering a whole era’s moral bookkeeping. “An endeavour” is the tell: he frames polygamy less as scandal or sin than as a business venture, a scheme. That mild, almost managerial phrasing drains the romance and replaces it with the language of overreach and bad accounting. Then comes the punch: “more out of life than there is in it.” The joke isn’t simply that polygamy is greedy; it’s that it misunderstands the basic math of satisfaction. Desire, in Hubbard’s view, isn’t expanded by adding spouses; it’s multiplied into logistical chaos, jealousy, divided attention, and diminished returns. The aphorism turns abundance into scarcity.

The subtext is as much about modern appetite as marriage. Hubbard wrote at the turn of the century, when American consumer culture, self-improvement ideology, and a churn of new freedoms encouraged people to treat life like a buffet. In that context, polygamy becomes a handy emblem for the broader fantasy that you can out-hack human limits: time, intimacy, emotional bandwidth. It’s a swipe at the same acquisitive mindset that promises you can optimize your way into fullness.

There’s also a respectable bit of social positioning. By choosing wit over sermon, Hubbard signals a worldly sophistication: the proper audience doesn’t need a Bible verse; it needs a smirk. The line reinforces monogamy not through piety, but through the cooler authority of irony.