James Branch Cabell Quotes

40 quotes in 541 categories

• 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…
• There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.
• People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.
• Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.
• 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 all events, I do not mean to leave it unaltered.
• I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.
• The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.
• Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong
• No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.
• Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?
• Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.
• 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…
• No lady is ever a gentleman.
• People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.
• I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books — brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and…
• Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.
• 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…
• 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…
• In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.

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