Quotes from James Branch Cabell

Yet creeds mean very little, Coth answered the dark god, still speaking almost gently. The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.

The touch of time does more than the club of Hercules.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There is no gift more great than love.

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

No lady is ever a gentleman.

The optimist claims we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

There is no memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

People marry through a variety of other reasons, and with varying results: but to marry for love is to invite inevitable tragedy.

Why is the King of Hearts the only one that hasn't a moustache?

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

There is not any memory with less satisfaction than the memory of some temptation we resisted.

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is

But with man the case is otherwise, in that when logic leads to any humiliating conclusion, the sole effect is to discredit logic.

Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken 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.

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

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

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

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

nobody can live longer in peace than his neighbor chooses.