Quotes from Jerome K. Jerome

Throw the lumber over, man!  Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. (Chapter XV)

Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me.  I was a hospital in myself.  All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma. Then

Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.

The charge I myself should bring against the German people is that of over indulgence in patriotism. Out of it have grown most of their follies.

Six shillings a week does not keep body and soul together very unitedly.

I daresay that was only river water, if we had known. But we did not know, so it was alright. What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get upset over. (Chapter XII)

Very well, then,' said my friend's wife, rising, 'all I have to say is, that I shall take the children and go to an hotel until those cheeses are eaten.

Being out in a boat on the river Lea, especially on Saturday afternoons, soon makes you smart at handling a craft, and spry at escaping being run down by roughs or swamped by barges; ... But it does not give you style. It was not till I came to the Thames that I got style. My style of rowing is much admired now. People say it is so quaint.

Heavenly melody, in our then state of mind, would only have still further harrowed us.  A soul-moving harmony, correctly performed, we should have taken as a spirit-warning, and have given up all hope.  But about the strains of "He's got 'em on," jerked spasmodically, and with involuntary variations, out of a wheezy accordion, there was something singularly human and reassuring.

We did not know what had happened at first, because the sail shut out the view, but from the nature of the language that rose up upon the evening air, we gathered that we had come into the neighbourhood of human beings, and that they were vexed and discontented.

I walked into that reading-room a happy healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

It is a part of the river in which to dream of bygone days, and vanished forms and faces, and things that might have been, but are not, confound them.

I am not sure, but I think it was in connection with a discussion on Maeterlinck.

O amor é como o sarampo, todos sofremos com ele um dia.

asked if it was a vestry meeting; or, if not, who was being murdered, and why?

And don't stuff up your head with things you don't understand.

Then we cleaned up, and put everything straight (a continual labour, which was beginning to afford me a pretty clear insight into a question that had often posed me—namely, how a woman with the work of only one house on her hands manages to pass away her time)

I looked at the piles of plates and cups, and kettles, and bottles and jars, and pies and stoves, and cakes, and tomatoes, &c., and felt that the thing would soon become exciting. It did. They started with breaking a cup. That was the first thing they did. They did that just to show you what they COULD do, and to get you interested.

far from the madding crowd

Par che a questo mondo la regola sia questa. Ogni persona ha ciò che non vuole, e ciò che vorrebbe l'hanno gli altri.

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.  Then virtue and contentment will come and reign within your heart, unsought by any effort of your own; and you will be a good citizen, a loving husband, and a tender father, a noble, pious man.

Each person has what he doesn't want, and other people have what he does want. Married

It is not that I object to work, mind you; I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.