Jerome K. Jerome

“ I know you, Time, godlike and dread though you seem. What are you but a phantom—a dream—like the rest of us here? Ay, less, for you will pass away and be no more. Fear him not, immortal men. Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity! ”

“ I do not care to talk much about this clock; because when I tell the simple truth concerning it, people think I am exaggerating.
It is very discouraging to find, when you are straining every nerve to tell the truth, that people do not believe you, and fancy that you are exaggerating. It makes you feel inclined to go and exaggerate on purpose, just to show them the difference. I know I often feel tempted to do so myself—it is my early training that saves me.
We should always be very careful never to give way to exaggeration; it is a habit that grows upon one. ”

“ To ourselves, sleeping and waking there, behind the rainbow, there is no beauty in the house; only a chill damp mist in every room, and, over all, a haunting fear of the hour when the gilded clouds will melt away, and let us fall—somewhat heavily, no doubt—upon the hard world underneath. ”

“ I am the greatest cheesemonger, I am the greatest soldier, I am the greatest statesman, I am the greatest poet, I am the greatest showman, I am the greatest mountebank, I am the greatest editor, and I am the greatest patriot. We are the greatest nation. We are the only good people. ”

“ 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. To him whose eyes have opened on the nineteenth century, what nobler image can the universe produce than the figure of Falsehood in stolen robes? ”

“ Burst one day he must, as it is in the nature of bubbles to burst, especially when they grow big. Meanwhile, he still reigns over us, and the world grows more and more a world of pretense and exaggeration and lies; and he who pretends and exaggerates and lies the most successfully, is the greatest of us all. ”

“ In the old times, when poets and dry-goods salesmen were the only people who exaggerated, there was something clever and distingue about a reputation for "a tendency to over, rather than to under-estimate the mere bald facts." But everybody exaggerates nowadays. The art of exaggeration is no longer regarded as an "extra" in the modern bill of education; it is an essential requirement, held to be most needful for the battle of life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is in this spirit of child-like faith in its integrity that, one morning, you gather your family around you in the passage, kiss your children, and afterward wipe your jammy mouth, poke your finger in the baby's eye, promise not to forget to order the coals, wave at last fond adieu with the umbrella, and depart for the railway-station. ”

“ We have sunk so low now that we try to act our exaggerations, and to live up to our lies. We call it "keeping up appearances;" and no more bitter phrase could, perhaps, have been invented to describe our childish folly. ”

“ Time is but the shadow of the world upon the background of Eternity!" ”

“ The workers in the fields below look up and envy us our abode of glory and delight! If they think it pleasant, surely we should be content. Have we not been taught to live for others and not for ourselves, and are we not acting up bravely to the teaching—in this most curious method? ”

“ If we possess a hundred pounds a year, do we not call it two? Our larder may be low and our grates be chill, but we are happy if the "world" (six acquaintances and a prying neighbor) gives us credit for one hundred and fifty. ”

“ After awhile, having learned the trick, we launch out boldly and spend like Indian Princes—or rather seem to spend; for we know, by this time, how to purchase the seeming with the seeming, how to buy the appearance of wealth with the appearance of cash. ”

“ He needs much "keeping up." He has no bones and sinews of his own, the poor old flimsy fellow! If we take our hands from him, he will fall a heap of worn-out rags, and the angry wind will whirl him away, and leave us forlorn. ”

“ Let us raise him aloft upon our Brummagem shields. Long live our coward, falsehearted chief!—fit leader for such soldiers as we! Long live the Lord-of-Lies, anointed! Long live poor King Appearances, to whom all mankind bows the knee! ”

“ Therefore, what is left for us to do, but to crow? And the best and greatest of us all, is he who crows the loudest and the longest on this little dunghill that we call our world!
Well, I was going to tell you about our clock.
It was my wife's idea, getting it, in the first instance. We had been to dinner at the Buggles', and Buggles had just bought a clock—"picked it up in Essex," was the way he described the transaction. Buggles is always going about "picking up" things. ”

“ And each free and independent voter shall have a bran new Utopia made on purpose for him, according to his own ideas, with a good-sized, extra-unpleasant purgatory attached, to which he can send everybody he does not like. ”

“ There is none great or clever. The great and clever men are not here; there is no place for them in this pandemonium of charlatans and quacks. The men you see here are crowing cocks. We suppose the greatest and the best of them are they who crow the loudest and the longest ”

“ The clock impressed my wife very much. She was very thoughtful all the way home, and, as we went upstairs to our flat, she said, "Why could not we have a clock like that?" She said it would seem like having some one in the house to take care of us all—she should fancy it was looking after baby!
I have a man in Northamptonshire from whom I buy old furniture now and then, and to him I applied. He answered by return to say that he had got exactly the very thing I wanted. (He always has. I am very lucky in this respect.) ”

“ The man who can live in the same house with one of these clocks, and not endanger his chance of heaven about once a month by standing up and telling it what he thinks of it, is either a dangerous rival to that old established firm, Job, or else he does not know enough bad language to make it worth his while to start saying anything at all. ”