James Branch Cabell Quotes

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

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#4. Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .

James Branch Cabell

#5. Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#9. And one would worship a woman whom all perfections dower, But the other smiles at transparent wiles; and he quotes from Schopenhauer . Thus two by two we wrangle and blunder about the earth, And that body we share we may not spare; but the Gods have need of mirth.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#11. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#13. Now, but these three," cried Jurgen, "are the glory of Philistia: and of all that Philistia has produced, it is these three alone, whom living ye made least of, that today are honored wherever art is honored, and where nobody bothers one way or the other about Philistia.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#15. Men have begun to observe and classify, they turn from creation to Criticism ... It is the Fashion to be a wit ... one must be able to conceal indecency with elegant diction; manners are everything, morals nothing.

James Branch Cabell

#16. No lady is ever a gentleman.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#19. I am willing to taste any drink once.

James Branch Cabell

#20. Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.

James Branch Cabell

#21. 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.

James Branch Cabell

#22. A manpossessesnothing certainlysavea brief loanof his own body.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#24. I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.

James Branch Cabell

#25. 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.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#27. People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.

James Branch Cabell

#28. ... nobody can live longer in peace than his neighbor chooses.

James Branch Cabell

#29. It amuses me to weep for a dead man with eyes that once were his.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#31. alcohol played the midwife

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#33. 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.

James Branch Cabell

#34. What really matters is that there is so much faith and love and kindliness which we can share with and provoke in others, and that by cleanly, simple, generous living we approach perfection in the highest and most lovely of all arts ... But you, I think, have always comprehended this.

James Branch Cabell

#35. Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#37. 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?

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#41. Patriotism is the religion of hell.

James Branch Cabell

#42. 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.

James Branch Cabell

#43. There is no gift more great than love.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#45. 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.

James Branch Cabell

#46. For all men have but a little while to live and none knows his fate thereafter. So that a man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his body: and yet the body of man is capable of much curious pleasure.

James Branch Cabell

#47. 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.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#49. In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#51. 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.

James Branch Cabell

#52. I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books - brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

#55. 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.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell