Top 140 Jerome K. Jerome Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Better to work and fail than to sleep one’s life away.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

52. “I did not intend to write a funny book, at first. I did not know I was a humorist. I have never been sure about it. In the middle ages, I should probably have gone about preaching and got myself burnt or hanged.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

53. “If there is one person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not think exactly the same on all topics as I do...”

— Jerome K. Jerome

54. “We shall never be content until each man makes his own weather and keeps it to himself.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

55. “The proverbial Englishman, we know from old chronicler Froissart, takes his pleasures sadly, and the Englishwoman goes a step further and takes her pleasures in sadness itself.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

56. “Man, if he would live, must worship. He looks around, and what to him, within the vision of his life, is the greatest and the best, that he falls down and does reverence to.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

57. “A glass of wine often makes me a better man than hearing a sermon.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

58. “It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

59. “Swearing relieves the feelings – that is what swearing does. I explained this to my aunt on one occasion, but it didn’t answer with her. She said I had no business to have such feelings.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

60. “A Spaniard will seek to persuade you that the bull-ring is an institution got up chiefly for the benefit of the bull.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

61. “The world must be rather a rough place for clever people. Ordinary folk dislike them, and as for themselves, they hate each other most cordially.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

62. “Five thousand people in one society might do something, but five thousand societies of one member each would be a holy trouble.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

63. “I often arrive at quite sensible ideas and judgements, on the spur of the moment. It is when I stop to think that I become foolish.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

64. “Evil thought is a dangerous pet. It is safer to play with it from behind the iron bars of circumstance.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

65. “What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn’t elevate a cow.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

66. “Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

67. “Such is life; and we are but as grass that is cut down, and put into the oven and baked.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

68. “There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

69. “It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

70. “What I am looking for is a blessing not in disguise.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

71. “Nature was beautiful, even in her tears.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

72. “A cat’s got her own opinion of human beings. She don’t say much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious not to hear the whole of it.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

73. “There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet – except in dreams.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

74. “We like, we cherish, we are very, very fond of – but we never love again.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

75. “One we discover how to appreciate the timeless values in our daily experiences, we can enjoy the best things in life.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

76. “Memory is a rare ghost-raiser. Like a haunted house, its walls are ever echoing to unseen feet. Through the broken casements we watch the flitting shadows of the dead, and the saddest shadows of them all are the shadows of our own dead selves.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

77. “The weather is like the government, always in the wrong.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

78. “But who wants to be foretold the weather? It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

79. “What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get upset over.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

80. “No, we never sicken with love twice. Cupid spends no second arrow on the same heart. Love’s handmaids are our life-long friends. Respect, and admiration, and affection, our doors may always be left open for, but their great celestial master, in his royal progress, pays but one visit and departs. We like, we cherish, we are very, very fond of – but we never love again.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

81. “People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

82. “Conceit is the finest armour a man can wear.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

83. “It takes 3 girls to tow always; two to hold the rope, and the other one runs round and round, and giggles.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

84. “It all comes of being so attractive, as the old lady said when she was struck by lightning.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

85. “He is very imprudent, a dog; he never makes it his business to inquire whether you are in the right or the wrong, never asks whether you are rich or poor, silly or wise, sinner or saint. You are his pal. That is enough for him.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

86. “Think of the man who first tried German sausage.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

87. “Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs are, and it will take years and years of patient effort on the part of us Christians to bring about any appreciable reformation in the rowdiness of the fox-terrier nature.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

88. “There is nothing more remarkable in human sociology than our attitude towards the institution of marriage.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

89. “I saw a great Newfoundland dog the other day sitting in front of a mirror at the entrance to a shop in Regent’s Circus, and examining himself with an amount of smug satisfaction that I have never seen equaled elsewhere outside a vestry meeting.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

90. “It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

91. “That’s Harris all over – so ready to take the burden of everything himself, and put it on the backs of other people.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

92. “The less taste a person has in dress, the more obstinate he always seems to be.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

93. “How good one feels when one is full – how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

94. “Harris’s fixed ideas that he can sing a comic song; the fixed idea, on the contrary, among those of Harris’s friends who have heard him try, is that he can’t and never will be able to, and that he ought not to be allowed to try.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

95. “Opportunities flit by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

96. “Give an average baby a fair chance, and if it doesn’t do something it oughtn’t to a doctor should be called in at once.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

97. “There is this advantage about German beer: it does not make a man drunk as the word drunk is understood in England. There is nothing objectionable about him; he is simply tired. He does not want to talk; he wants to be let alone, to go to sleep; it does not matter where – anywhere.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

98. “Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

99. “And when they reached St. Albans, there would be that wretched couple, kissing under the Abbey walls. Then these folks would go and be pirates until the marriage was over.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

100. “The shy man does have some slight revenge upon society for the torture it inflicts upon him.”

— Jerome K. Jerome