Top 140 Jerome K. Jerome Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I like work. It fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

2. “A new life begins for us with every second. Let us go forward joyously to meet it. We must press on, whether we will or not, and we shall walk better with our eyes before us than with them ever cast behind.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

3. “It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

4. “Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

5. “I love the chill October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your feet.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

6. “Life works upon a compensating balance, and the happiness we gain in one direction we lose in another.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

7. “Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

8. “We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

9. “A boy’s muscles move quicker than his thoughts.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

10. “Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

11. “Nothing is more beautiful than the love that has weathered the storms of life. The love of the young for the young, that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that is the beginning of things longer.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

12. “It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

13. “When you forget to take the sail at all, then the wind is constantly in your favour both ways. But there! this world is only a probation, and man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

14. “Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

15. “Eat good dinners and drink good wine; read good novels if you have the leisure and see good plays; fall in love, if there is no reason why you should not fall in love; but do not pore over influenza statistics.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

16. “It is no more effort for a man to be a saint than to be a sinner; it becomes a mere matter of habit.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

17. “The facts of life are the impossibilities of fiction.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

18. “Among all nations there should be vast temples raised where people might worship in silence and listen to it, for it is the voice of God.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

19. “I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

Featured in: Reading Quotes

20. “But we are so blind to our own shortcomings, so wide awake to those of others. Everything that happens to us is always the other person’s fault.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

21. “A good woman’s arms round a man’s neck is a lifebelt thrown out to him from heaven.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

22. “Splendid cheeses they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

23. “I can’t sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can’t help it.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

24. “Only those who have worn the crown of suffering can look upon that wondrous light; and they, when they return, may not speak of it, or tell the mystery they know. Once.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

25. “It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

26. “I don’t understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

27. “I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don’t want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

28. “All is vanity and everybody’s vain. Women are terribly vain. So are men – more so, if possible.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

29. “I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

30. “1lb beefstak, with 1pt bitter beer every 6 hours. 1 ten-mile walk every morning. 1 bed at 11 sharp every night. And don’t stuff your head with things you don’t understand.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

31. “Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

32. “You can always tell the old river hand by the way in which he stretches himself out upon the cushions at the bottom of the boat, and encourages the rowers by telling them anecdotes about the marvellous feats he performed last season...”

— Jerome K. Jerome

33. “Nature, always inartistic, takes pleasure in creating the impossible.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

34. “It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

35. “It seems to me so shocking to see the precious hours of a man’s life – the priceless moments that will never come back to him again – being wasted in a mere brutish sleep.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

36. “It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn’t be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

37. “Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

38. “If you are foolish enough to be contented, don’t show it, but grumble with the rest; and if you can do with a little, ask for a great deal. Because if you don’t you won’t get any.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

39. “Everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

40. “We are so bound together that no man can labor for himself alone. Each blow he strikes in his own behalf helps to mold the universe.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

41. “It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

42. “I don’t know why it should be, I am sure; but the sight of another man asleep in bed when I am up, maddens me.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

43. “There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

44. “The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

45. “Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. Also like the measles, we take it only once. One never need be afraid of catching it a second time.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

46. “When a man or woman loves to brood over a sorrow and takes care to keep it green in their memory, you may be sure it is no longer a pain to them.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

47. “I can see the humorous side of things and enjoy the fun when it comes; but look where I will, there seems to me always more sadness than joy in life.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

Featured in: Fun Quotes

48. “It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

49. “Love is too pure a light to burn long among the noisome gases that we breathe, but before it is choked out we may use it as a torch to ignite the cozy fire of affection.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

50. “Better to work and fail than to sleep one’s life away.”

— Jerome K. Jerome