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Jerome K. Jerome Quotes | Quotes said by Jerome K. Jerome

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #1

    (Speaking of the Cistercian monks) A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature's voices all around them--the soft singing of the waters, the wisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind--should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.


  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #2

    A solemn sadness reigns. A great peace is around us. In its light our cares of the working day grow small and trivial, and bread and cheese—ay, and even kisses—do not seem the only things worth striving for. Thoughts we cannot speak but only listen to flood in upon us, and standing in the stillness under earth's darkening dome, we feel that we are greater than our petty lives. Hung round with those dusky curtains, the world is no longer a mere dingy workshop, but a stately temple wherein man may worship, and where at times in the dimness his groping hands touch God's.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #3

    A woman never thoroughly cares for her
    lover until he has ceased to care for her; and it is not until you have
    snapped your fingers in Fortune's face and turned on your heel that she
    begins to smile upon you.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #4

    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!

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #5

    After breakfast the host takes the young man into a corner, and explains to him that what he saw was the ghost of a lady who had been murdered in that very bed, or who had murdered somebody else there - it does not really matter which: you can be a ghost by murdering somebody else or by being murdered yourself, whichever you prefer. The murdered ghost is, perhaps, the more popular; but, on the other hand, you can frighten people better if you are the murdered one, because then you can show your wounds and do groans.

    (Introduction to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #6

    Ah, those foolish days, those foolish days when we were unselfish and pure-minded; those foolish days when our simple hearts were full of truth, and faith, and reverence! Ah, those foolish days of noble longings and of noble strivings! And oh, these wise, clever days when we know that money is the only prize worth striving for, when we believe in nothing else but meanness and lies, when we care for no living creature but ourselves!

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #7

    Are we labouring at some Work too vast for us to perceive? Are our passions and desires mere whips and traces by the help of which we are driven? Any theory seems more hopeful than the thought that all our eager, fretful lives are but the turning of a useless prison crank. Looking back the little distance that our dim eyes can penetrate the past, what do we find? Civilizations, built up with infinite care, swept aside and lost. Beliefs for which men lived and died, proved to be mockeries. Greek Art crushed to the dust by Gothic bludgeons. Dreams of fraternity, drowned in blood by a Napoleon. What is left to us, but the hope that the work itself, not the result, is the real monument? Maybe, we are as children, asking, Of what use are these lessons? What good will they ever be to us? But there comes a day when the lad understands why he learnt grammar and geography, when even dates have a meaning for him. But this is not until he has left school, and gone out into the wider world. So, perhaps, when we are a little more grown up, we too may begin to understand the reason for our living

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #8

    As our means increase, so do our desires;and we ever stand midway between the two.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #9

    Be not the first by whom the new is tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside,” is a safe rule for those who would always retain the good opinion of that all-powerful, but somewhat unintelligent, incubus, “the average person,” but the pioneer, the guide, is necessary. That is, if the world is to move forward.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #10

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

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #11

    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.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #12

    Các v? này nói r?ng tôi có th? tr? thành m?t nhà tho không d?n n?i t?i, s? là tác gi? c?a nh?ng ti?u thuy?t t?m t?m, làm phóng viên phóng hòn cho m?y t? lá c?i ho?c gì dó d?i lo?i th?, nhung d?ng hòng có tên tu?i gì trong linh v?c b?t cá sông Thêm. Ð? du?c nhu v?y ph?i có d?u óc tu?ng tu?ng phong phú, có tính lãng m?n cao và ph?i không bi?t ngu?ng v? nh?ng sáng t?o c?a chính mình!

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #13

    George got out his banjo after supper, and wanted to play it, but Harris objected: he said he had got a headache, and did not feel strong enough to stand it. George thought the music might do him good - said music often soothed the nerves and took away a headache; and he twanged two or three notes, just to show Harris what it was like.

    Harris said he would rather have the headache.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #14

    Harris said, however, that the river would suit him to a T. I don't know what a T is (except a sixpenny one, which includes bread-and- butter and cake AD LIB., and is cheap at the price, if you haven't had any dinner). It seems to suit everybody, however, which is greatly to its credit.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #15

    Harris, as he occasionally explains to George and to myself, has daughters of his own, or, to speak more correctly, a daughter, who as the years progress will no doubt cease practising catherine wheels in the front garden , and will grow up into a beautiful and respectable young lady. This naturally gives Harris an interest in all beautiful girls up to the age of thirty-five or thereabouts; they remind him, so he says, of home.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #16

    He does love prophesying a misfortune, does the average British ghost. Send him out to prognosticate trouble to somebody, and he is happy. Let him force his way into a peaceful home, and turn the whole house upside down by foretelling a funeral, or predicting a bankruptcy, or hinting at a coming disgrace, or some other terrible disaster, about which nobody in their senses would want to know sooner than they could possible help, and the prior knowledge of which can serve no useful purpose whatsoever, and he feels that he is combining duty with pleasure. He would never forgive himself if anybody in his family had a trouble and he had not been there for a couple of months beforehand, doing silly tricks on the lawn or balancing himself on somebody's bedrail.

    (Introduction to TOLD AFTER SUPPER)

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #17

    He told us that it had been a fine day to-day, and we told him that it had been a fine day yesterday, and then we all told each other that we thought it would be a fine day to-morrow; and George said the crops seemed to be coming up nicely.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #18

    I also think pronunciation of a foreign tongue could be better taught than by demanding from the pupil those internal acrobatic feats that are generally impossible and always useless. This is the sort of instruction one receives: 'Press your tonsils against the underside of your larynx. Then with the convex part of the septum curved upwards so as almost but not quite to touch the uvula try with the tip of your tongue to reach your thyroid. Take a deep breath and compress your glottis. Now without opening your lips say Garoo.' And when you have done it they are not satisfied.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #19

    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.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #20

    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.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #21

    I don't understand German myself. I learned it at school, but forgot every word of it two years after I had left, and have felt much better ever since.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #22

    I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #23

    I knew a young fellow once, who was studying to play the bagpipes, and you would be surprised at the amount of opposition he had to contend with. Why, not even from the members of his own family did he receive what you could call active encouragement. His father was dead against the business from the beginning, and spoke quite unfeelingly on the subject.

    My friend used to get up early in the morning to practise, but he had to give that plan up, because of his sister. She was somewhat religiously inclined, and she said it seemed such an awful thing to begin the day like that.

    So he sat up at night instead, and played after the family had gone to bed, but that did not do, as it got the house such a bad name. People, going home late, would stop outside to listen, and then put it about all over the town, the next morning, that a fearful murder had been committed at Mr. Jefferson's the night before; and would describe how they had heard the victim's shrieks and the brutal oaths and curses of the murderer, followed by the prayer for mercy, and the last dying gurgle of the corpse.

    So they let him practise in the day-time, in the back-kitchen with all the doors shut; but his more successful passages could generally be heard in the sitting-room, in spite of these precautions, and would affect his mother almost to tears.

    She said it put her in mind of her poor father (he had been swallowed by a shark, poor man, while bathing off the coast of New Guinea - where the connection came in, she could not explain).

    Then they knocked up a little place for him at the bottom of the garden, about quarter of a mile from the house, and made him take the machine down there when he wanted to work it; and sometimes a visitor would come to the house who knew nothing of the matter, and they would forget to tell him all about it, and caution him, and he would go out for a stroll round the garden and suddenly get within earshot of those bagpipes, without being prepared for it, or knowing what it was. If he were a man of strong mind, it only gave him fits; but a person of mere average intellect it usually sent mad.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #24

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

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #25

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

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #26

    I look in the glass sometimes at my two long, cylindrical bags (so picturesquely rugged about the knees), my stand-up collar and billycock hat, and wonder what right I have to go about making God's world hideous. Then wild and wicked thoughts come into my heart. I don't want to be good and respectable. (I never can be sensible, I'm told; so that don't matter.) I want to put on lavender-colored tights, with red velvet breeches and a green doublet slashed with yellow; to have a light-blue silk cloak on my shoulder, and a black eagle's plume waving from my hat, and a big sword, and a falcon, and a lance, and a prancing horse, so that I might go about and gladden the eyes of the people. Why should we all try to look like ants crawling over a dust-heap? Why shouldn't we dress a little gayly? I am sure if we did we should be happier. True, it is a little thing, but we are a little race, and what is the use of our pretending otherwise and spoiling fun? Let philosophers get themselves up like old crows if they like. But let me be a butterfly.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #27

    I often arrive at quite sensible ideas and judgements, on the spur of the moment. It is when I stop to think that I become foolish.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #28

    I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #29

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

  • Jerome K. Jerome Quote #30

    If he didn`t want his opinion,why did he ask for it?

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