Top 100 Jerome K. Jerome Quotes
#1. Times Mayor of Abingdon - was, no doubt, a benefactor to his generation, but I hope there are not many of his kind about in this overcrowded nineteenth century.
Jerome K. Jerome
#6. Aunt Maria would mildly observe that, next time Uncle Podger was going to hammer a nail into the wall, she hoped he'd let her know in time, so that she could make arrangements to go and spend a week with her mother while it was being done.
Jerome K. Jerome
#7. It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over.
Jerome K. Jerome
#8. Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity.
Jerome K. Jerome
#9. I can't sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can't help it.
Jerome K. Jerome
#10. That's Harris all over - so ready to take the burden of everything himself, and put it on the backs of other people.
Jerome K. Jerome
#11. I don't know why it should be, I am sure; but the sight of another man asleep in bed when I am up, maddens me.
Jerome K. Jerome
#12. It is in the petty details, not in the great results, that the interest of existence lies.
Jerome K. Jerome
#13. I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
Jerome K. Jerome
#14. as for exercise! why, you'll get more exercise, sitting down on that ship, than you would turning somersaults on dry land.
Jerome K. Jerome
#15. Evil thought is a dangerous pet. It is safer to play with it from behind the iron bars of circumstance.
Jerome K. Jerome
#16. All is vanity and everybody's vain. Women are terribly vain. So are men - more so, if possible.
Jerome K. Jerome
#17. We are so bound together that no man can labor for himself alone. Each blow he strikes in his own behalf helps to mold the universe.
Jerome K. Jerome
#18. Nobody ever loved as he loves, and so, of course, the rest of the world's experience can be no guide in his case.
Jerome K. Jerome
#19. I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.
Jerome K. Jerome
#20. I do like cats. They are so unconsciously amusing. There is such a comic dignity about them, such a "How dare you!" "Go away, don't touch me" sort of air.
Jerome K. Jerome
#21. Now, I will drink no German beer. The white wine of the country, with a little soda-water; perhaps occasionally a glass of Ems or potash. But beer, never - or, at all events, hardly ever." It is a good and useful resolution, which I recommend to all travellers. I
Jerome K. Jerome
#22. Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.
Jerome K. Jerome
#23. A cat's got her own opinion of human beings. She don't say much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious not to hear the whole of it.
Jerome K. Jerome
#24. If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.
Jerome K. Jerome
#26. A woman never thoroughly cares for her
lover until he has ceased to care for her; and it is not until you have
snapped your fingers in Fortune's face and turned on your heel that she
begins to smile upon you.
Jerome K. Jerome
#27. Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma. Then
Jerome K. Jerome
#28. You can always tell the old river hand by the way in which he stretches himself out upon the cushions at the bottom of the boat, and encourages the rowers by telling them anecdotes about the marvellous feats he performed last season.
Jerome K. Jerome
#29. No, there is nothing at all funny in poverty - to the poor. It is hell upon earth to a sensitive man; and many a brave gentleman who would have faced the labors of Hercules has had his heart broken by its petty miseries.
Jerome K. Jerome
#30. I respect the truth too much to drag it out on every occasion.
Jerome K. Jerome
#31. THERE were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were - bad from a medical point of view I mean, of course.
Jerome K. Jerome
#33. But who wants to be foretold the weather? It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand.
Jerome K. Jerome
#34. I wrote a poem once - a simple thing, but instinct with longing - while sitting under a tree and listening to the cooing of a pigeon. But that was in the afternoon. My only longing now was for a gun. Three
Jerome K. Jerome
#35. Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago, has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday.
Jerome K. Jerome
#36. There must be something ghostly in the air of Christmas - something about the close, muggy atmosphere that draws up the ghosts, like the dampness of the summer rains brings out the frogs and snails.
Jerome K. Jerome
#37. If you are foolish enough to be contented, don't show it, but grumble with the rest; and if you can do with a little, ask for a great deal. Because if you don't you won't get any.
Jerome K. Jerome
#38. It must have been worth while having a mere ordinary plague now and then in London to get rid of both the lawyers and the Parliament.
Jerome K. Jerome
#39. It is a most remarkable thing. I sat down with the full intention of writing something clever and original; but for the life of me I can't think of anything clever and original
at least, not at this moment.
Jerome K. Jerome
#40. George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two.
Jerome K. Jerome
#41. And we sit there, by its margin, while the moon, who loves it too, stoops down to kiss it with a sister's kiss, and throws her silver arms around it clingingly.
Jerome K. Jerome
#42. Splendid cheeses they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards.
Jerome K. Jerome
#43. It's really extraordinary what a variety of ways of loving there must be. We all do it as it was never done before.
Jerome K. Jerome
#44. Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake.
Jerome K. Jerome
#45. Five thousand people in one society might do something, but five thousand societies of one member each would be a holy trouble.
Jerome K. Jerome
#46. A boy's love comes from a full heart; a man's is more often the result of a full stomach.
Jerome K. Jerome
#47. Let us play the game of life as sportsmen, pocketing our winnings with a smile, leaving our losings with a shrug.
Jerome K. Jerome
#49. It seems to be the rule of this world. Each person has what he doesn't want, and other people have what he does want.
Jerome K. Jerome
#50. No, what was sad in his case was that he, who didn't care for carved oak, should have his drawing-room panelled with it, while people who do care for it have to pay enormous prices to get it. It seems to be the rule of this world.
Jerome K. Jerome
#51. There is an iron "scold's bridle" in Walton Church. They used these things in ancient days for curbing women's tongues. They have given up the attempt now. I suppose iron was getting scarce, and nothing else would be strong enough.
Jerome K. Jerome
#52. A glass of wine often makes me a better man than hearing a sermon.
Jerome K. Jerome
#53. I never knew you played the banjo!" cried Harris and I, in one breath.
"Not exactly," replied George: "but it's very easy, they tell me; and I've got the instruction book!"
From Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome
#54. Angelina would have gone on loving Edwin forever and ever and ever if only Edwin had not grown so strange and different. Edwin would have adored Angelina through eternity if Angelina had only remained the same as when he first adored her.
Jerome K. Jerome
#55. It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.
Jerome K. Jerome
#56. Has he been snatched up to heaven?" I queried. "They'd hardly have taken the pie too," said George.
Jerome K. Jerome
#58. Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs are, and it will take years and years of patient effort on the part of us Christians to bring about any appreciable reformation in the rowdiness of the fox-terrier nature.
Jerome K. Jerome
#59. It all comes of being so attractive, as the old lady said when she was struck by lightning.
Jerome K. Jerome
#60. In a boat, I have always noticed that it is the fixed idea of each member of the crew that he is doing everything.
Jerome K. Jerome
#61. There are the goods; if you want them, you can have them. If you do not want them, they would almost rather that you did not come and talk about them.
Jerome K. Jerome
#62. A good woman's arms round a man's neck is a lifebelt thrown out to him from heaven.
Jerome K. Jerome
#64. Memory is a rare ghost-raiser. Like a haunted house, its walls are ever echoing to unseen feet. Through the broken casements we watch the flitting shadows of the dead, and the saddest shadows of them all are the shadows of our own dead selves.
Jerome K. Jerome
#65. 1lb beefstak, with
1pt bitter beer
every 6 hours.
1 ten-mile walk every morning.
1 bed at 11 sharp every night.
And don't stuff your head with things you don't understand.
Jerome K. Jerome
#66. I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.
Jerome K. Jerome
#67. I often arrive at quite sensible ideas and judgements, on the spur of the moment. It is when I stop to think that I become foolish.
Jerome K. Jerome
#68. To tell you the truth - mind, this is strictly between ourselves, please; I shouldn't like your wife to know I said it - the women folk don't understand these things; but between you and me, you know, I think it does a man good to swear.
Jerome K. Jerome
#69. Love is too pure a light to burn long among the noisome gases that we breathe, but before it is choked out we may use it as a torch to ignite the cozy fire of affection.
Jerome K. Jerome
#71. If my name was on a serious work like this it would never get fair treatment. They would all say I had tried to be funny and failed.
Jerome K. Jerome
#72. But we are so blind to our own shortcomings, so wide awake to those of others. Everything that happens to us is always the other person's fault.
Jerome K. Jerome
#73. Contented, unambitious people are all very well in their way. They form a neat, useful background for great portraits to be painted against, and they make a respectable, if not particularly intelligent, audience for the active spirits of the age to play before.
Jerome K. Jerome
#75. The greatest minds never realise their ideals in any matter;
Jerome K. Jerome
#76. The less taste a person has in dress, the more obstinate he always seems to be.
Jerome K. Jerome
#77. Life works upon a compensating balance, and the happiness we gain in one direction we lose in another.
Jerome K. Jerome
#79. Cassivelaunus had prepared the river for Caesar, by planting it full of stakes (and had, no doubt, put up a notice-board).
Jerome K. Jerome
#80. "Not sure," he retorted; "you call yourself a journalist, and admit there is a subject under Heaven of which you are not sure!"
Jerome K. Jerome
#81. It seems to me so shocking to see the precious hours of a man's life - the priceless moments that will never come back to him again - being wasted in a mere brutish sleep.
Jerome K. Jerome
#82. Life was not an idle dream to be gaped and yawned through, but a noble task, full of duty and stern work.
Jerome K. Jerome
#83. Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise.
Jerome K. Jerome
#84. Weather in towns is like a skylark in a counting-house-out of place and in the way.
Jerome K. Jerome
#85. There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard.
Jerome K. Jerome
#86. Harris said, however, that the river would suit him to a "T." I don't know what a "T" is (except a sixpenny one, which includes bread-and- butter and cake AD LIB., and is cheap at the price, if you haven't had any dinner). It seems to suit everybody, however, which is greatly to its credit.
Jerome K. Jerome
#87. Harris's fixed ideas that he can sing a comic song; the fixed idea, on the contrary, among those of Harris's friends who have heard him try, is that he can't and never will be able to, and that he ought not to be allowed to try.
Jerome K. Jerome
#88. I like cats ... When I meet a cat, I say, "Poor Pussy!" and stoop down and tickle the side of its head; and the cat sticks up its tail in a rigid, cast-iron manner, arches its back, and wipes its nose up against my trousers; and all is gentleness and peace.
Jerome K. Jerome
#89. Affection will burn cheerily when the white flame of love is flickered out. Affection is a fire that can be fed from day to day and be piled up ever higher as the wintry years draw nigh.
Jerome K. Jerome
#90. It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty.
Jerome K. Jerome
#91. They [dogs] never talk about themselves but listen to you while you talk about yourself, and keep up an appearance of being interested in the conversation.
Jerome K. Jerome
#92. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without.
Jerome K. Jerome
#93. The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness.
Jerome K. Jerome
#94. There are two kinds of clocks. There is the clock that is always wrong, and that knows it is wrong, and glories in it; and there is the clock that is always right - except when you rely upon it, and then it is more wrong than you would think a clock could be in a civilized country.
Jerome K. Jerome
#95. One we discover how to appreciate the timeless values in our daily experiences, we can enjoy the best things in life.
Jerome K. Jerome
#96. Opportunities flit by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.
Jerome K. Jerome
#98. Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. Also like the measles, we take it only once. One never need be afraid of catching it a second time.
Jerome K. Jerome
#99. Foolish wise folk sneer at you; foolish wise folk would pull up the useless lilies, the needless roses, from the garden, would plant in their places only serviceable wholesome cabbage. But the Gardener knowing better, plants the silly short-lived flowers; foolish wise folk, asking for what purpose.
Jerome K. Jerome
#100. I saw a great Newfoundland dog the other day sitting in front of a mirror at the entrance to a shop in Regent's Circus, and examining himself with an amount of smug satisfaction that I have never seen equaled elsewhere outside a vestry meeting.
Jerome K. Jerome
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