Jerome K. Jerome - Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

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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
There are various methods by which you may achieve ignominy and shame. By murdering a large and respected family in cold blood and afterward depositing their bodies in the water companies' reservoir, you will gain much unpopularity in the neighborhood of your crime, and even robbing a church will get you cordially disliked, especially by the vicar. But if you desire to drain to the dregs the fullest cup of scorn and hatred that a fellow human creature can pour out for you, let a young mother hear you call dear baby "it."

Jerome K. Jerome
Ah! how delicious it is to turn over and go to sleep again: "just for five minutes." Is there any human being, I wonder, besides the hero of a Sunday-school "tale for boys," who ever gets up willingly?

Jerome K. Jerome
That is just the way with Memory; nothing that she brings to us is complete. She is a willful child; all her toys are broken. I remember tumbling into a huge dust-hole when a very small boy, but I have not the faintest recollection of ever getting out again; and if memory were all we had to trust to, I should be compelled to believe I was there still.

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
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
It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch each other, and find sympathy. It is in our follies that we are one.

Jerome K. Jerome
It is not the actual discomforts themselves that are hard to bear. Who would mind roughing it a bit if that were all it meant? What cared Robinson Crusoe for a patch on his trousers? Did he wear trousers? I forget; or did he go about as he does in the pantomimes? What did it matter to him if his toes did stick out of his boots? and what if his umbrella was a cotton one, so long as it kept the rain off? His shabbiness did not trouble him; there was none of his friends round about to sneer him. Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.

Jerome K. Jerome
Our trouble is sore indeed when you turn away and will not comfort us. How long the dawn seems coming when we cannot sleep! Oh! those hideous nights when we toss and turn in fever and pain, when we lie, like living men among the dead, staring out into the dark hours that drift so slowly between us and the light. And oh! those still more hideous nights when we sit by another in pain, when the low fire startles us every now and then with a falling cinder, and the tick of the clock seems a hammer beating out the life that we are watching.

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 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
Conceit is the finest armor that a man can wear. Upon its smooth, impenetrable surface the puny dagger-thrusts of spite and envy glance harmlessly aside. Without that breast-plate the sword of talent cannot force its way through the battle of life, for blows have to be borne as well as dealt.

Jerome K. Jerome
When a man or woman loves to brood over a sorrow and takes care to keep it green in their memory, you may be sure it is no longer a pain to them.

Jerome K. Jerome
It is easy enough to say that poverty is no crime. No; if it were men wouldn't be ashamed of it. It is a blunder, though, and is punished as such. A poor man is despised the whole world over.

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

Jerome K. Jerome
There have been a good many funny things said and written about hardupishness, but the reality is not funny, for all that. It is not funny to have to haggle over pennies. It isn't funny to be thought mean and stingy. It isn't funny to be shabby and to be ashamed of your address. No, there is nothing at all funny in poverty — to the poor.

Jerome K. Jerome
And fighting the battle of life is fighting against fearful odds, too. There are giants and dragons in this nineteenth century, and the golden casket that they guard is not so easy to win as it appears in the story-books.

Jerome K. Jerome
The shy man does have some slight revenge upon society for the torture it inflicts upon him. He is able, to a certain extent, to communicate his misery. He frightens other people as much as they frighten him. He acts like a damper upon the whole room, and the most jovial spirits become, in his presence, depressed and nervous.

Jerome K. Jerome
Oh, give me back the good old days of fifty years ago, has been the cry ever since Adam's fifty-first birthday.

Jerome K. Jerome
Life works upon a compensating balance, and the happiness we gain in one direction we lose in another.

Jerome K. Jerome
It is only the first baby that takes up the whole of a woman's time.Five or six do not require nearly so much attention as one.

Jerome K. Jerome
There are many families where the whole interest of life is centered upon the dog.

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

Jerome K. Jerome
Weather in towns is like a skylark in a counting-house-out of place and in the way.

Jerome K. Jerome
It's really extraordinary what a variety of ways of loving there must be. We all do it as it was never done before.

Jerome K. Jerome
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
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
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 new life begins for us with every second. Let us go forward joyously to meet it. We must press on, whether we will or not, and we shall walk better with our eyes before us than with them ever cast behind.

Jerome K. Jerome