Jerome K. Jerome Quotes

127 Sourced Quotes

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. 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. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.

Jerome K. Jerome
It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

Jerome K. Jerome
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. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

Jerome K. Jerome
We take all things in a minor key as we grow older. There are few majestic passages in the later acts of life's opera. Ambition takes a less ambitious aim. Honor becomes more reasonable and conveniently adapts itself to circumstances. And love—love dies. "Irreverence for the dreams of youth" soon creeps like a killing frost upon our hearts. The tender shoots and the expanding flowers are nipped and withered, and of a vine that yearned to stretch its tendrils round the world there is left but a sapless stump

Jerome K. Jerome
Love is too pure a light to burn long among the noisome gases that we breathe, but before it is choked out we may use it as a torch to ignite the cozy fire of affection.

Jerome K. Jerome
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
It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is seasick - on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be seasick.

Jerome K. Jerome
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
It seems to me so shocking to see the precious hours of a man's life - the priceless moments that will never come back to him again - being wasted in a mere brutish sleep.

Jerome K. Jerome
I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.

Jerome K. Jerome
We like, we cherish, we are very, very fond of—but we never love again.

Jerome K. Jerome
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
We are so bound together that no man can labor for himself alone. Each blow he strikes in his own behalf helps to mold the Universe.

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

Jerome K. Jerome
Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs.

Jerome K. Jerome
Love is woman's business,and in "business" we all lay aside our natural weaknesses.

Jerome K. Jerome
It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty.

Jerome K. Jerome
A woman never thoroughly cares for her lover until he has ceased to care for her; and it is not until you have snapped your fingers in Fortune's face and turned on your heel that she begins to smile upon you.

Jerome K. Jerome
We do not hate, nor grieve, nor joy, nor despair in our thirties like we did in our teens. Disappointment does not suggest suicide, and we quaff success without intoxication.

Jerome K. Jerome
I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.

Jerome K. Jerome
Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it. Also like the measles, we take it only once... No, we never sicken with love twice. Cupid spends no second arrow on the same heart.

Jerome K. Jerome
Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake. Mere bald fabrication is useless; the veriest tyro can manage that. It is in the circumstantial detail, the embellishing touches of probability, the general air of scrupulous - almost of pedantic - veracity, that the experienced angler is seen.

Jerome K. Jerome
[Women] hate flattery, so they tell you; and when you say, 'Ah, darling, it isn't flattery in your case, it's plain, sober truth; you really are, without exaggeration, the most beautiful…the most perfect human creature…' they will smile a quiet approving smile.

Jerome K. Jerome
A man rarely carries his shyness past the hobbledehoy period. Even if his own inward strength does not throw it off, the rubbings of the world generally smooth it down.

Jerome K. Jerome
But there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses.

Jerome K. Jerome