James Branch Cabell Men Quotations

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

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.

In the beginning the Gods made man, and fashioned the sky and the sea, And the earth's fair face for man's dwelling-place, and this was the Gods' decree: "Lo, We have given to man five wits: he discerneth folly and sin; He is swift to deride all the world outside, and blind to the world within: So that man may make sport and amuse Us, in battling for phrases or pelf, Now that each may know what forebodeth woe to his neighbor, and not to himself.

There is no escaping, at times, the gloomy suspicion that fiddling with pens and ink is, after all, no fit employment for a grown man.

In what else, pray, does man differ from the other animals except in that he is used by words?

For all men have but a little while to live and none knows his fate thereafter. So that a man possesses nothing certainly save a brief loan of his body: and yet the body of man is capable of much curious pleasure.

American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison .... Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent.

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.

What is man that his welfare be considered? An ape who chatters of kinship with the archangels while he very filthily digs for groundnuts. And yet I perceive that this same man is a maimed God. He is condemned under penalty to measure eternity with an hourglass and infinity with a yardstick and what is more, he very nearly does it.

I am Manuel. I have lived in the loneliness which is common to all men, but the difference is that I have known it. Now it is necessary for me, as it is necessary for all men, to die in this same loneliness, and I know that there is no help for it.

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.

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

Every notion that any man, dead, living, or unborn, might form as to the universe will necessarily prove wrong

Good and evil keep very exact accounts... and the face of every man is their ledger.

Man alone of animals plays the ape to his dreams .