James Branch Cabell Quotes

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

No lady is ever a gentleman.

Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.

People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.

Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?

Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.

Creeds matter very little... The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. So I elect for neither label.

Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.

People must have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go out of it we must take what we find. That is all.

Patriotism is the religion of hell.

I do that which I do in every place. Here also, at the gateway of that garden into which time has not entered, I fight with time my ever-losing battle, because to do that diverts me.

Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.

I am willing to taste any drink once.

What am I that I am called upon to have prejudices concerning the universe?

But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.

I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.

No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.

Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong

The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills — and as immortal.

In what else, pray, does man differ from the other animals except in that he is used by words?

Trapped dreams must die.

Oh, do the Overlords of Life and Death always provide some obstacle to prevent what all of us have known in youth was possible from ever coming true?

I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.

There is no gift more great than love.

I take it that I must be the eternal playfellow of time. For piety and common-sense and death are rightfully time's toys; and it is with these three that I divert myself.

In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.

Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day.

As it is, plain reasoning assures me I am not indispensable to the universe: but with this reasoning, somehow, does not travel my belief.

Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.

The man was not merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.

Some few there must be in every age and every land of whom life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings.

At all events, I do not mean to leave it unaltered.

The realization that life is absurdand cannot be an end, but only abeginning. This is a truth nearly allgreat minds have taken as their starting point.

The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.

Love, I take it, must look toward something not quite accessible, something not quite understood.

People marry through a variety of other reasons, and with varying results: but to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.

The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .

A manpossessesnothing certainlysavea brief loanof his own body.

There is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown man.

Life is very marvelous... and to the wonders of the earth there is no end appointed.

There are many of our so-called captains on industry who, if the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth.

There is no memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

The optimist claims we live in the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist fears this is true.

alcohol played the midwife

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic

...[we] has left nothing durable to signalize his stay upon this planet.[we]eventually dies to the honest regret of [our] associates.

That moving carcass does but very inadequately symbolizes you....a subtle and immortal spirit.