James Branch Cabell Quotes

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.

If we assiduously cultivate our powers of exaggeration, perhaps we, too, shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures ... and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past 'the still-vex'd Bermoothes,' and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one will speak the truth there, and we shall all be perfectly happy.

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

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.

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

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.

In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned the sky and the sea, And the earth's fair face for man's dwelling-place, and this was the Gods' decree: Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth folly and sin; He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind to the world within: So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in battling for phrases or pelf, Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his neighbor, and not to himself.

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

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.

American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison ... Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent.

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

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.

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

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

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is

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

alcohol played the midwife

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .

A man of genuine literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one most variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his writings where it conceivably might be just predetermined affectation but in his personality.

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.

Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.

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

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

The religion of Hell is patriotism, and the government is an enlightened democracy.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

A manpossessesnothing certainlysavea brief loanof his own body.

Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest cliches of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets, here to, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest ...

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

There is no gift more great than love.

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

In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.

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.