Jerome K. Jerome Quotes - Page 2

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.

Angels may be very excellent sort of folk in their way, but we, poor mortals, in our present state, would probably find them precious slow company.

We drink [to] one another's health and spoil our own.

If there is one person I do despise more than another, it is the man who does not think exactly the same on all topics as I do.

The less taste a person has in dress, the more obstinate he always seems to be.

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.

If you are foolish enough to be contented, don't show it, but grumble with the rest; and if you can do with a little, ask for a great deal. Because if you don't you won't get any.

Cultivate a sense of humour. From a humorous point of view this lunch is rather good.

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.

Nature, always inartistic, takes pleasure in creating the impossible.

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

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

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.

We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can't do without.

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

The advantage of literature over life is that its characters are clearly defined, and act consistently.

A boy's muscles move quicker than his thoughts.

But who wants to be foretold the weather? It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand.

Ambition is only vanity ennobled.

Love is like the measles; we all have to go through it.

Life will always remain a gamble, with prizes sometimes for the imprudent, and blanks so often to the wise.

It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions.... 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.

(Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them--the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind--should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.

Truth and fact are old-fashioned and out-of-date, my friends, fit only for the dull and vulgar to live by. Appearance, not reality, is what the clever dog grasps at in these clever days. We spurn the dull-brown solid earth; we build our lives and homes in the fair-seeming rainbow-land of shadow and chimera.

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