James Branch Cabell Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More James Branch Cabell quote about:
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“Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“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 -
“There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“The only way of rendering life endurable is to drink as much wine as one can come by.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“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.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“No person of quality ever remembers social restrictions save when considering how most piquantly to break them.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“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.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“Literature is a vast bazaar where customers come to purchase everything except mirrors.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“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.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“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.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills — and as immortal.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“At all events, I do not mean to leave it unaltered.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“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."”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“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.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“People marry for a variety of reasons and with varying results. But to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.”
-- 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 -
“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 -
“The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“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.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“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.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“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.”
-- James Branch Cabell -
“There is no gift more great than love.”
-- James Branch Cabell
