Top 140 Jerome K. Jerome Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Life is a thing to be lived, not spent; to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one’s hand by skill to be made the best of.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

52. “We are but the veriest, sorriest slaves of our stomach. Reach not after morality and righteousness, my friends; watch vigilantly your stomach, and diet it with care and judgment.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

53. “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

54. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

69. “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

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

79. “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

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

81. “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

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

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

— 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. “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

97. “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

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

— Jerome K. Jerome

99. “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

100. “Let us play the game of life as sportsmen, pocketing our winnings with a smile, leaving our losings with a shrug.”

— Jerome K. Jerome