Top 50 James Branch Cabell Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

3. “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

4. “I am willing to taste any drink once.”

— James Branch Cabell

5. “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.”

— James Branch Cabell

6. “There is no gift more great than love.”

— James Branch Cabell

7. “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

8. “Thou shalt not offend against the notions of thy neighbor.”

— James Branch Cabell

9. “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.”

— James Branch Cabell

10. “Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .”

— James Branch Cabell

11. “Patriotism is the religion of hell.”

— James Branch Cabell

12. “Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn’t a moustache?”

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

15. “In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.”

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

18. “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.”

— James Branch Cabell

19. “Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is.”

— James Branch Cabell

20. “What am I that I am called upon to have prejudices concerning the universe?”

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

23. “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

24. “Trapped dreams must die.”

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

27. “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.”

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

29. “No lady is ever a gentleman.”

— James Branch Cabell

30. “Whatever there is to know, That shall we know one day.”

— James Branch Cabell

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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?”

— James Branch Cabell

36. “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

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

— James Branch Cabell

38. “The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills – and as immortal.”

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

Featured in: Reading Quotes

40. “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

41. “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.”

— James Branch Cabell

42. “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.”

— James Branch Cabell

43. “The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.”

— James Branch Cabell

44. “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

45. “A manpossessesnothing certainlysavea brief loanof his own body.”

— James Branch Cabell

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

— James Branch Cabell

47. “I am looking for my wife, whom I suspect to have been carried off by a devil, poor fellow!”

— James Branch Cabell

48. “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.”

— James Branch Cabell

49. “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

50. “Well, love is very pleasant to observe as he advances, overthrowing all ancient memories with laughter. And yet for each gay lover who concedes the lordship of love, and wears intrepidly love’s liveries, the end of all is death.”

— James Branch Cabell