86 Quotes by James Branch Cabell

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

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.

As it is, plain reasoning assures me I am not indispensable to the universe: but with this reasoning, somehow, does not travel my belief.

I fear You and, yes, I love You: and yet I cannot believe. Why could You not let me believe, where so many believed? Or else, why could You not let me deride, as the remainder derided so noisily? O God, why could You not let me have faith? for You gave me no faith in anything, not even in nothingness. It was not fair.

And one would worship a woman whom all perfections dower, But the other smiles at transparent wiles; and he quotes from Schopenhauer . Thus two by two we wrangle and blunder about the earth, And that body we share we may not spare; but the Gods have need of mirth.

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.

In religious matters a traveller loses nothing by civility.

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

I have followed after the truth, across this windy planet upon which every person is nourished by one or another lie.