James Branch Cabell Quotes

In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.

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.

I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful — being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational.

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

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

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

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

There is no gift more great than love.

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.

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.

For although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high moral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon both sides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or the ruin of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering and general breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after all other wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had been unprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious to say so.

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

No lady is ever a gentleman.

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

Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.

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

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

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

Sad hours and glad hours, and all hours, pass over; One thing unshaken stays: Life, that hath Death for spouse, hath Chance for lover; Whereby decays, Each thing save one thing: mid this strife diurnal, Of hourly change begot, Love that is God-born, bides as God eternal, And changes not; Nor means a tinseled dream pursuing lovers, Find altered by-and-bye, When, with possession, time anon discovers, Trapped dreams must die, - For he that visions God, of mankind gathers, One manlike trait alone, And reverently imputes to Him a father's love for his son.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

The optimist sees a light at the end of the tunnel, the realist sees a train entering the tunnel, the pessimist sees a train speeding at him, hell for leather, and the machinist sees three idiots sitting on the rail track. "The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist fears this is true."

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.

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

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

I fear You and, yes, I love You: and yet I cannot believe. Why could You not let me believe, where so many believed? Or else, why could You not let me deride, as the remainder derided so noisily? O God, why could You not let me have faith? for You gave me no faith in anything, not even in nothingness. It was not fair.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken atwill 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.

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

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

Patriotism is the religion of hell.

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

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it.