James Branch Cabell quotes

James Branch Cabell was an American author known for his fantasy fiction and satirical works. His most famous book, "Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice," became a classic and sparked controversy for its themes. He greatly influenced the development of modern fantasy literature. Here are 157 of his quotes:

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

The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.

James Branch Cabell

Men have begun to observe and classify, they turn from creation to Criticism... It is the Fashion to be a wit... one must be able to conceal indecency with elegant diction; manners are everything, morals nothing.

James Branch Cabell

Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest cliches of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets, here to, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a denouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest...

James Branch Cabell

A man of genuine literary genius, since he possesses a temperament whose susceptibilities are of wider area than those of any other, is inevitably of all people the one most variously affected by his surroundings. And it is he, in consequence, who of all people most faithfully and compactly exhibits the impress of his times and his times' tendencies, not merely in his writings where it conceivably might be just predetermined affectation but in his personality.

James Branch Cabell

Poetry is man's rebellion against being what he is.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

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

The desire to write perfectly of beautiful happenings is, as the saying runs, old as the hills - and as immortal.

James Branch Cabell

There are many of our so-called captains on industry who, if the truth were told, and a shorter and uglier word were not unpermissible, are little better than malefactors of great wealth.

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

Oh, do the Overlords of Life and Death always provide some obstacle to prevent what all of us have known in youth was possible from ever coming true?

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

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

James Branch Cabell

I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books - brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.

James Branch Cabell

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

James Branch Cabell

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams.

James Branch Cabell

There is no gift more great than love.

James Branch Cabell

I do that which I do in every place. Here also, at the gateway of that garden into which time has not entered, I fight with time my ever-losing battle, because to do that diverts me.

James Branch Cabell

The man was not merely very human; he was humanity. And I reflected that it is only by preserving faith in human dreams that we may, after all, perhaps some day make them come true.

James Branch Cabell