Quotes by Jerome K. Jerome

“It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to kee...”

“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...”

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

“It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most ...”

“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.”

“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 di...”

“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 g...”

“(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 water...”

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

“The day has been so full of fret and care, and our hearts have been so full of evil and of bitter thoughts, and the world has seemed so hard and wrong to us. Then Night, like some great loving moth...”

“You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris- no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never "weeps, he knows not why." If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is becau...”

“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.”

“What the eye does not see, the stomach does not get upset over”

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

“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. After eggs ...”

“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 s...”

“When Montmorency meets a cat, the whole street knows about it; and there is enough bad language wasted in ten seconds to last an ordinarily respectable man all his life, with care.”

“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.”

“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,...”

“In my youth, the question chiefly important to me wasWhat sort of man shall I decide to be? At nineteen one asks oneself this question; at thirty-nine we say, I wish Fate hadnt made me this sort of...”