Jerome K. Jerome Men Quotations

Conceit is the finest armour a man can wear.

When you forget to take the sail at all, then the wind is constantly in your favour both ways. But there! this world is only a probation, and man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.

I can't sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can't help it.

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

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.

The odour of Burgundy, and the smell of French sauces, and the sight of clean napkins and long loaves, knocked as a very welcome visitor at the door of our inner man.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Think of the man who first tried German sausage.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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.

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

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.