“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“But I like my madness. There is a thrill in it unknown to such sanity as yours. ~ Book 1, Chapter 9,”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“...it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.'
'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.’
– Book 3, Chapter 16”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. You must change man, not systems.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“He was suffering from the loss of an illusion.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“The idea of equality is a by-product of the sentiment of envy. Since it must always prove beyond human ower to raise the inferior mass to a superior stratum, apostles of equality must ever be inferiors seeking to reduce their betters to their level. It follows that a nation that once admits this doctrine of equality will be dragged by it to the level, moral, intelletual and political, of its most worthless class.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“I am afraid, monsieur, you will have to kill me first, and I have a prejudice against being killed before nine o'clock.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“If the windmill should prove too formidable," said he, from the threshold, "I may see what can be done with the wind.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“there is no worse hell than that provided by the regrets for wasted opportunities.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“Most of this world's misery is the fruit not as priests tell us of wickedness, but of stupidity....
And we know that of all stupidities he considered anger the most deplorable.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“But he looks no more than thirty. He's very handsome-- so much you will admit; nor will you deny that he is very wealthy and very powerful; the greatest nobleman in Brittany. He will make me a great lady.'
'God made you that, Aline.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. you must change man, not systems. Can you and our vapouring friends of the Literary Chamber of Rennes, or any other learned society of France, devise a system of government that has never yet been tried? Surely not. And can we say of any system tried that it proved other than failure in the end? My dear Philippe, the future is to be read with certainty only in the past. Ad actu ad posse valet consecutio. Man never changes. He is always greedy, always acquisitive, always vile. I am speaking of Man in the bulk.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“With you it is always the law, never equity.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“To deal justice by death has this disadvantage that the victim has no knowledge that justice has overtaken him. Had you died, had you been torn limb from limb that night, I should now repine in the thought of your eternal and untroubled slumber. Not in euthanasia, but in torment of mind should the guilty atone. You see, I am not sure that hell hereafter is a certainty, whilst I am quite sure that it can be a certainty in this life; and I desire you to continue to live yet awhile that you may taste something of its bitterness.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“It is a futile and ridiculous struggle—but then... it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“I recognize myself for part of this mad world, I suppose. You wouldn't have me take it seriously? I should lose my reason utterly if I did;”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“You often show yourself without any faculty of deductive reasoning.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“Oh, you are mad!" she exclaimed, quite out of patience.
"Possibly. But I like my madness.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess- unless he is a coward.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“I hate possibilities—God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“In life we pay for the evil that in life we do.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encyclopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into an unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his own species.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“I admit that it is audacious," said Scaramouche. "But at your time of life you should have learnt that in this world nothing succeeds like audacity.”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
“Do you wonder that they will”
― Rafael Sabatini, quote from Scaramouche
Rafael Sabatini
Born place: in Jesi, Italy
Born date April 29, 1875
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“. . . my obsession with gratefulness. I can't stop. Just now, I press the elevator button and am thankful that it arrives quickly. I get onto the elevator and am thankful that the elevator cable didn't snap and plummet me to the basement. I go to the fifth floor and am thankful that I didn't have to stop on the second or third or fourth floor. I get out and am thankful that Julie left the door unlocked so I don't have to rummage for my King Kong key ring. I walk in, and am thankful that Jasper is home and healthy and stuffing his face with pineapple wedges. And on and on. I'm actually muttering to myself, 'Thank you. . .thank you. . . thank you.' It's an odd way to live. But also kind of great and powerful. I've never before been so aware of the thousands of little good things, the thousands of things that go right every day.”
― A.J. Jacobs, quote from The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible
“Never climb a tree in a long dress," Kate panted, coming up behind me.
"I'll remember that," I said.”
― Kenneth Oppel, quote from Airborn
“The concept that really gets the goat of the gay-hater, the idea that really spins their melon and sickens their stomachs is that most terrible and terrifying of all human notions, love.
That one can love another of the same gender, that is what the homophobe really cannot stand. Love in all eight tones and all five semitones of the world's full octave.
Love as Agape, Eros and Philos; love as infatuation, obsession and lust; love as torture, euphoria, ecstasy and oblivion (this is beginning to read like a Calvin Klein perfume catalogue); love as need, passion and desire.”
― Stephen Fry, quote from Moab Is My Washpot
“A smile flitted over his full mouth, it was so rare and fleeting that it robbed her of her breath.”
― Erica Stevens, quote from Captured
“Is there not glory enough in living the days given to us? You should know there is adventure in simply being among those we love and the things we love, and beauty, too.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Black Cauldron
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