James Branch Cabell Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

James Branch Cabell
Whatever there is to know,
That shall we know one day.

James Branch Cabell
In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.

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

James Branch Cabell
What am I that I am called upon to have prejudices concerning the universe?

James Branch Cabell
At what cost, now, may one attempt to write perfectly of beautiful happenings?

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

James Branch Cabell
Virtue has always been conceived of as victorious resistance to one's vital desire.

James Branch Cabell
Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.

James Branch Cabell
Life is very marvelous … and to the wonders of the earth there is no end appointed.

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

James Branch Cabell
In what else, pray, does man differ from the other animals except in that he is used by words?

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

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

James Branch Cabell
You touch on a disheartening truth. People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.

James Branch Cabell
The Terrible and Marvellous History of Manuel Pig-Tender That Afterwards Was Named Manuel the Redeemer.

James Branch Cabell
Whatever pretended pessimists in search of notoriety may say, most people are naturally kind, at heart.

James Branch Cabell
Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong

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

James Branch Cabell
The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills — and as immortal.

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

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

James Branch Cabell
People must have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go out of it we must take what we find. That is all.

James Branch Cabell
Hey, my masters, lords and brothers, ye that till the fields of rhyme,
Are ye deaf ye will not hearken to the clamor of your time?

James Branch Cabell
Dreaming a dream to prize,
Is wishing ghosts to rise;
And, if I had the spell
To call the buried — well,
Which one would I?

James Branch Cabell
There is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown man.

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

James Branch Cabell
If the Author will it, there may be appended to any comedy an afterpiece. Meanwhile, so far as I may judge, the life of Manuel ends here.

James Branch Cabell
Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony, — and, therefore, why shouldn't I have changed a trifle?

James Branch Cabell
While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.

James Branch Cabell