Top 15 James Branch Cabell Quotes

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

For although this was a very heroic war, with a parade of every sort of high moral principle, and with the most sonorous language employed upon both sides, it somehow failed to bring about either the reformation or the ruin of humankind: and after the conclusion of the murdering and general breakage, the world went on pretty much as it has done after all other wars, with a vague notion that a deal of time and effort had been unprofitably invested, and a conviction that it would be inglorious to say so.

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

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is

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.

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

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

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

Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith of what use they made of half-hours and months and years... I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was a little time of which the passing might be made endurable; beyond gaped unpredictable darkness: and that was all there was of certainty anywhere.

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

To submit is the great lesson. I too was once a dreamer: and in dreams there are lessons. But to submit, without dreaming any more, is the great lesson; to submit, without either understanding or repining, and without demanding of life too much of beauty or of holiness, and without shirking the fact that this universe is under no least bond ever to grant us, upon either side of the grave, our desires. To do that, my son, does not satisfy and probably will not ever satisfy a Puysange. But to do that is wisdom.

Poetry is man’s rebellion against being what he is. (1879-1958)

…nobody can live longer in peace than his neighbor chooses.

...because intelligent persons do not attempt to keep abreast with modern fiction. It is probably ascribable to the fact that they enjoy being intelligent, and wish to remain so.

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic