Jerome K. Jerome Quotations

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

I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

But there, everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses.

There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do.

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

One we discover how to appreciate the timeless values in our daily experiences, we can enjoy the best things in life.

The weather is like the government, always in the wrong.

I can see the humorous side of things and enjoy the fun when it comes; but look where I will, there seems to me always more sadness than joy in life.

It is always the best policy to speak the truth, unless, of course, you are an exceptionally good liar.

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.

Conceit is the finest armour a man can wear.

It is so pleasant to come across people more stupid than ourselves. We love them at once for being so.

It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form.

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.

Nothing is more beautiful than the love that has weathered the storms of life. The love of the young for the young, that is the beginning of life. But the love of the old for the old, that is the beginning of things longer.

Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity.

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.

What I am looking for is a blessing not in disguise.

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.

Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.

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.

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.

I attribute the quarrelsome nature of the Middle Ages young men entirely to the want of the soothing weed.

Too much of anything is a mistake, as the man said when his wife presented him with four new healthy children in one day. We should practice moderation in all matters.

Cultivate," I said, "a sense of humor. From a humorous point of view this lunch is rather good.

I respect the truth too much to drag it out on every occasion.

A good woman's arms round a man's neck is a lifebelt thrown out to him from heaven.

Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

Opportunities flit by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.

It seems to me so shocking to see the precious hours of a man's life - the priceless moments that will never come back to him again - being wasted in a mere brutish sleep.

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...

They [dogs] never talk about themselves but listen to you while you talk about yourself, and keep up an appearance of being interested in the conversation.

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

Eat good dinners and drink good wine; read good novels if you have the leisure and see good plays; fall in love, if there is no reason why you should not fall in love; but do not pore over influenza statistics.

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.

A glass of wine often makes me a better man than hearing a sermon.

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

There may be a better land where bicycle saddles are made of rainbow, stuffed with cloud; in this world the simplest thing is to get used to something hard.

There is no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams.

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.

It is well we cannot see into the future. There are few boys of fourteen who would not feel ashamed of themselves at forty.

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

Idling has always been my strong point.

I should never make anything of a fisherman. I had not got sufficient imagination

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

Life is a thing to be lived, not spent; to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one's hand by skill to be made the best of.

I don't know why it should be, I am sure; but the sight of another man asleep in bed when I am up, maddens me.

Being poor is a mere trifle. It is being known to be poor that is the sting.

After a cup of tea (two spoonsful for each cup, and don't let it stand more than three minutes,) it says to the brain, "Now, rise, and show your strength. Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature and into life; spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!

He is very imprudent, a dog; he never makes it his business to inquire whether you are in the right or the wrong, never asks whether you are rich or poor, silly or wise, sinner or saint. You are his pal. That is enough for him.

I want a house that has got over all its troubles; I don't want to spend the rest of my life bringing up a young and inexperienced house.

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.

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.

Splendid cheeses they were, ripe and mellow, and with a two hundred horse-power scent about them that might have been warranted to carry three miles, and knock a man over at two hundred yards.

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

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

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.

I love the chill October days, when the brown leaves lie thick and sodden underneath your feet ... the evenings in late autumn time, when the white mist creeps across the fields, making it seem as though old Earth, feeling the night air cold to its poor bones, were drawing ghostly bedclothes round its withered limbs.

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

It is no more effort for a man to be a saint than to be a sinner; it becomes a mere matter of habit.

A boy's muscles move quicker than his thoughts.

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

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.

There are two kinds of clocks. There is the clock that is always wrong, and that knows it is wrong, and glories in it; and there is the clock that is always right - except when you rely upon it, and then it is more wrong than you would think a clock could be in a civilized country.

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.

There are the goods; if you want them, you can have them. If you do not want them, they would almost rather that you did not come and talk about them.

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

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.

Cheese, like oil, makes too much of itself.

Some people are under the impression that all that is required to make a good fisherman is the ability to tell lies easily and without blushing; but this is a mistake.

Think of the man who first tried German sausage.

Among all nations there should be vast temples raised where people might worship in silence and listen to it, for it is the voice of God

We shall never be content until each man makes his own weather and keeps it to himself.

All is vanity and everybody's vain. Women are terribly vain. So are men - more so, if possible.

Contented, unambitious people are all very well in their way. They form a neat, useful background for great portraits to be painted against, and they make a respectable, if not particularly intelligent, audience for the active spirits of the age to play before. I have not a word to say against contented people so long as they keep quiet.

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

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.

If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.

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.

Man, if he would live, must worship. He looks around, and what to him, within the vision of his life, is the greatest and the best, that he falls down and does reverence to.

Cassivelaunus had prepared the river for Caesar, by planting it full of stakes (and had, no doubt, put up a notice-board).

Seek out some retired and old-world spot, far from the madding crowd, and dream away a sunny week among its drowsy lanes - some half-forgotten nook, hidden away by the fairies, out of reach of the noisy world - some quaint-perched eyrie on the cliffs of Time, from whence the surging waves of the nineteenth century would sound far-off and faint.

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

The facts of life are the impossibilities of fiction.

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

Let us play the game of life as sportsmen, pocketing our winnings with a smile, leaving our losings with a shrug.

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.

A Spaniard will seek to persuade you that the bull-ring is an institution got up chiefly for the benefit of the bull.

So, eventually, he made one final arrangement with himself, which he has religiously held to ever since, and that was to count each fish that he caught as ten, and to assume ten to begin with. For example, if he did not catch any fish at all, then he said he had caught ten fish - you could never catch less than ten fish by his system; that was the foundation of it. Then, if by any chance he really did catch one fish, he called it twenty, while two fish would count thirty, three forty, and so on.

If a man stopped me in the street and demanded of me my watch, I should refuse to give it to him. If he threatened to take it by force, I feel I should, though not a fighting man, do my best to protect it. If, on the other hand, he should assert his intention of trying to obtain it by means of an action in any court of law, I should take it out of my pocket and hand it to him, and think I had got off cheaply.

Evil thought is a dangerous pet. It is safer to play with it from behind the iron bars of circumstance.

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.

It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one.

Ambition is only vanity ennobled.

Give an average baby a fair chance, and if it doesn't do something it oughtn't to a doctor should be called in at once.

What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn't elevate a cow.

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

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.

A cat's got her own opinion of human beings. She don't say much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious not to hear the whole of it.

It is a curious fact, but nobody ever is sea-sick - on land. At sea, you come across plenty of people very bad indeed, whole boat-loads of them; but I never met a man yet, on land, who had ever known at all what it was to be sea-sick. Where the thousands upon thousands of bad sailors that swarm in every ship hide themselves when they are on land is a mystery.