James Branch Cabell > Quotes

“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”
― James Branch Cabell, The Silver Stallion

“There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.”
― James Branch Cabell

“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.”
― James Branch Cabell, Figures of Earth

“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, Beyond Life

“Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is”
― James Branch Cabell

“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, The Cream of the Jest

“The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.”
― James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life

“I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.”
― James Branch Cabell

“People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.”
― James Branch Cabell

“No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.”
― James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life

“Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith of what use they made of half-hours and months and years... I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was a little time of which the passing might be made endurable; beyond gaped unpredictable darkness: and that was all there was of certainty anywhere.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen

“Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is. (1879-1958)”
― James Branch Cabell

“…nobody can live longer in peace than his neighbor chooses.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen

“To submit is the great lesson. I too was once a dreamer: and in dreams there are lessons. But to submit, without dreaming any more, is the great lesson; to submit, without either understanding or repining, and without demanding of life too much of beauty or of holiness, and without shirking the fact that this universe is under no least bond ever to grant us, upon either side of the grave, our desires. To do that, my son, does not satisfy and probably will not ever satisfy a Puysange. But to do that is wisdom.”
― James Branch Cabell, The High Place

“When you consider that presidents and chief-justices and archbishops and kings and statesmen are human beings like you and me and the laundryman, the thought becomes too horrible for humanity to face.”
― James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life

“Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic”
― James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life

“alcohol played the midwife”
― James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life

“...because intelligent persons do not attempt to keep abreast with modern fiction. It is probably ascribable to the fact that they enjoy being intelligent, and wish to remain so.”
― James Branch Cabell, The Cords of Vanity

“Now but before a fool's opinion of himself," the brown man cried, "the Gods are powerless. Oh, yes, and envious, too!”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“I am looking for my wife, whom I suspect to have been carried off by a devil, poor fellow!”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong”
― James Branch Cabell

“There is, moreover, a sign by which you may distinguish Thragnar. For if you deny what he says, he will promptly concede you are in the right. This was the curse put upon him by Miramon Lluagor, for a detection and a hindrance.” “By that unhuman trait,” says Jurgen, “ Thragnar ought to be very easy to distinguish.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen

“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

“I think there is something in me which will endure. I am fettered by cowardice, I am enfeebled by disastrous memories; and I am maimed by old follies. Still, I seem to detect in myself something which is permanent and rather fine. Underneath everything, and in spite of everything, I really do seem to detect that something. What rôle that something is to enact after the death of my body, and upon what stage, I cannot guess. When fortune knocks I shall open the door.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“That moving carcass does but very inadequately symbolizes you....a subtle and immortal spirit.”
― James Branch Cabell, Beyond Life

“...[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, Beyond Life

“Hah, all we poets write a deal about love: but none of us may grasp the word's full meaning until he reflects that this is a passion mighty enough to induce a woman to put up with him.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice

“A book, once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, — both grammatically and actually, — whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.”
― James Branch Cabell

“The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy.”
― James Cabell Branch, Jurgen

“Well, when in Rome," said Jurgen, "one must be romantic.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice