Rafael Sabatini Quotes

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

...it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.

But I like my madness. There is a thrill in it unknown to such sanity as yours. ~ Book 1, Chapter 9,

A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad,’ said he. ‘Few realize it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world.

Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.

But they were fated to misunderstand each other.

To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. You must change man, not systems.

Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can inhabit

He was suffering from the loss of an illusion.

Thirstily he set it to his lips, and as its cool refreshment began to soothe his throat, he thanked Heaven that in a world of much evil there was still so good a thing as ale.

It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden apple-trees on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that man—as he had long suspected—was the vilest work of God, and that only a fool would set himself up as a healer of a species that was best exterminated.

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

There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularly alluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity.

Truth is so often disconcerting.

Only he who is without anything is without enemies.

I am afraid, monsieur, you will have to kill me first, and I have a prejudice against being killed before nine o'clock.

It is not human to be wise,’ said Blood. ‘It is much more human to err, though perhaps exceptional to err on the side of mercy.

When all is said, a man's final judgment of his fellows must be based upon his knowledge of himself

Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.

there is no worse hell than that provided by the regrets for wasted opportunities.

Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations.

If the windmill should prove too formidable," said he, from the threshold, "I may see what can be done with the wind.

What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess- unless he is a coward.

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.

We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose.

With you it is always the law, never equity.

Laughter broke from them. It spread into a roar of acclamation; for bluff is a weapon dear to every adventurer.

It is a futile and ridiculous struggle—but then... it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.

Peter Blood judged her- as we are all prone to do- upon insufficient knowledge.

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.

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.

Life can be infernally complex,’ he said.

He saw light, dazzling, blinding, and it scared him.

Take your time, now,’ said Mr. Blood. ‘I never knew speed made by overhaste.

I am very poor - for a know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized.

Gold has at all times been considered the best of testimonies of good faith...

Other than her homework, Ollie was carrying Captain Blood by Rafael Sabatini, a broken-spined paperback that she'd dug out of he dad's bookshelves. She mostly liked it. Peter Blood outsmarted everyone, which was a feature she liked in heroes, although she wished Peter were a girl, or the villain were a girl, or someone in the book besides his boat and his girlfriend (both named Arabella) were a girl.

Id is fery boedigal!" he said, his blue eyes twinkling. "Cabdain Blood is fond of boedry - you remember de abble-blossoms. So? Ha, ha!

Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured.

He was recovering his normal self amazingly under the inspiring stimulus of conflict.

You often show yourself without any faculty of deductive reasoning.

Oh, you are mad!" she exclaimed, quite out of patience. "Possibly. But I like my madness.

I regret,' said he, 'that I have no cup; but, as you see, I can practise phlebotomy with a bottle.

I hope no man will call me timorous; and yet I'ld as soon be called that as rash.

He still had, you see, illusions about Christians.

In life we pay for the evil that in life we do.

I hate possibilities—God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them.

A deadly sin that brings no evil material sequel to the satisfaction afforded by committing it is one thing. A deadly sin that gives you the stomach-ache is quite another.

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;

Nació con el don de la risa y con la sensación de que el mundo estaba loco. Y ese era todo su patrimonio.

An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences. Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will, and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the very tool used by Fate to shape the destiny of men and nations. Observe it now at work in the affairs of Captain Blood and of some others.

There was a great historian lost in Wolverstone. He had the right imagination that knows just how far it is safe to stray from the truth and just how far to colour it so as to change its shape for his own purposes.

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.

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.

[Blood upon killing Levasseur] ‘I think that cancels the articles between us,’ he said.

Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it; and

...three degrees in the intelligence of mankind. To the first belong those who understand things for themselves by virtue of their own natural endowments; to the second those who have at least the wit to discern what others understand; and to the third those who neither understand things for themselves nor yet through the demonstrations which others afford them.

Life is an ephemeral business, and we waste too much of it in judging where it would beseem us better to accept, that we ourselves may come to be accepted by such future ages as may pursue the study of us.

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.

In endeavor itself there is a certain dynamic entertainment, affording an illusion of useful purpose. With achievement the illusion is dispelled. Man's greatest accomplishment is to produce change. The only good in life is study, because study is an endeavor that never reaches fulfillment. It busies a man to the end of his days, and it aims at the only true reality in all this world of shams and deceits.

If Mr. Blood had condescended to debate the matter with these ladies, he might have urged that having had his fill of wandering and adventuring, he was now embarked upon the career for which he had been originally intended and for which his studies had equipped him; that he was a man of medicine and not of war; a healer, not a slayer.

Dragostea ce nu ajunge sa se materializeze niciodata ramane adesea idealul care-l ghideaza pe om.

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.

we are all too prone to judge—upon insufficient knowledge.

A man may not fear to die, and yet be appalled by the form in which death comes to him.

[W]e are all savages under the cloak that civilization fashions for us.

From somewhere in the blue vault of heaven overhead came the joyous trilling of a lark, from below the silken rustling of the tideless sea.

It does not make me ridiculous simply to be less foul than those about me.

Whilst I’ll take any risk that I must, I’ll take none that I needn’t.

And where are the other gentry that were taken?—the real leaders of this plaguey rebellion. Grey’s case explains their absence, I think. They are wealthy men that can ransom themselves. Here awaiting the gallows are none but the unfortunates who followed; those who had the honor to lead them go free. It’s a curious and instructive reversal of the usual way of things. Faith, it’s an uncertain world entirely!

It was Pope Innocent III who placed in the hands of the church this terrible weapon of persecution, and who, by the awful severity of his own attitude towards liberty of conscience, of thought, and of expression, afforded to fanaticism and religious intolerance an example that was to be their merciless guide through centuries to come.

The moments that followed were full of interest. A stillness, a brooding, expectant stillness, fell upon the company—and it numbered a round dozen—about Lord Gervase's richly appointed board. In the soft candlelight the oval table

Inshore, across the pellucid jade-green waters of the bay, gently ruffled by the north-easterly breeze that was sweetly tempering the torrid heat of the sun, rose the ramage of masts and spars of the shipping riding there at anchor.

He vowed that the thought of her should continue ever before him to help him keep his hands as clean as a man might in this desperate trade upon which he was embarking. And so, although he might entertain no delusive hope of ever winning her for his own, of ever seeing her again, yet the memory of her was to abide in his soul as a bitter-sweet, purifying influence. The love that is never to be realized will often remain a man’s guiding ideal.

I am not one of your repentant sinners, Kenneth. I have lived my life—God, what a life!—and as I have lived I shall die, unflinching and unchanged. Dare one to presume that a few hours spent in whining prayers shall atone for years of reckless dissoluteness? 'Tis a doctrine of cravens, who, having lacked in life the strength to live as conscience bade them, lack in death the courage to stand by that life's deeds. I am no such traitor to myself.

I desire a society which selects its rulers from the best elements of every class and denies the right of any class or corporation to usurp the government itself--whether it be the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For government by any class is fatal to the welfare of the whole,

For, as Andre-Louis so truly says, there is no worse hell than that provided by the regrets for wasted opportunities.

Robbery is a serious, shameful matter, Captain Blood." "I know it is. I've practised a good deal of it myself.

Ah, but then, you see, I am a lawyer. And lawyers are notoriously unable to observe the law, just as actors are notoriously unable to act.

I dare say that we are all savages under the cloak that civilization fashions for us.

In Major Sands the intelligence was absent; but like most men in his case he was not aware of it.

Hell was made for Christians, which is why they seek to make earth like it.

Arabella: “You are very peremptory....” Captain Blood: “Oh my God, I am peremptory!

You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind.

A scarlet flame suffused her face. 'You are very insolent,’ she said, lamely. ‘I’ve often been told so. But I don’t believe it.

Do you wonder that they will

Evidently not. They are just governing

If the windmill should prove too formidable, I may see what can be done with the wind.

In my humble way I am a student of man, and some years ago I made the discovery that he is most intimately to be studied in the reflections of him provided for the theatre.

In doing this they are striking at the very foundations of the throne. These fools do not perceive that if that throne falls over, it is they who stand nearest to it who will be crushed.

He had wrought them up to a pitch of dangerous passion, and they were ripe for any violence to which he urged them. If he had failed with the windmill, at least he was now master of the wind.

enemies." "What Christian resignation!" "As for hating you, of all people! Why... I consider you adorable. I envy Leandre every day of my life. I have seriously thought of setting him to play Scaramouche, and playing lovers myself.

But he looks no more than thirty. He is very handsome - so much you will admit; nor will you deny that he is very wealthy and very powerful; the greatest nobleman in Britany. He will make me a great lady." "God made you that, Aline.

And yet she was content to pair off with this dull young adventurer in the tarnished lace! It was, he supposed, the sort of thing to be expected of a sex that all philosophy had taught him to regard as the maddest part of a mad species.

Without entering here into a dissertation upon the historical romance, it may be said that in proper hands it has been and should continue to be one of the most valued and valuable expressions of the literary art. To render and maintain it so, however, it is necessary that certain well-defined limits should be set upon the licence which its writers are to enjoy; it is necessary that the work should be honest work; that preparation for it should be made by a sound, painstaking study of the period to be represented, to the end that a true impression may first be formed and then conveyed. Thus, considering how much more far-reaching is the novel than any other form of literature, the good results that must wait upon such endeavours are beyond question. The neglect of them—the distortion of character to suit the romancer's ends, the like distortion of historical facts, the gross anachronisms arising out of a lack of study, have done much to bring the historical romance into disrepute.

It was, he supposed, a manifestation of that romantic and unreasonable phenomenon known as chivalry. If he extricated himself alive from this predicament, he would see to it that whatever follies he committed in the future, chivalry would certainly not be found amongst them. Experience had cured him of any leanings in that direction.

But Guidobaldo scoffed at his qualms "Do you account my niece a peasant girl?" he asked. "Would you have her smirk and squirm at every piece of flattery you utter? So that she weds Your Highness what shall the rest signify?" "I would that she loved me a little," complained Gian Maria foolishly. Guidobaldo looked him over with an eye that smiled inscrutably, and it may have crossed his mind that this coarse white-faced Duke was too ambitious.

An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences. Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will, and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the very tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations

Every human society must of necessity be composed of several strata. You may disturb it temporarily into an amorphous whole by a revolution such as this; but only temporarily. Soon out of the chaos which is all that you and your kind can ever produce, order must be restored or life will perish; and with the restoration of order comes the restoration of the various strata necessary to organized society. Those that were yesterday at the top may in the new order of things find themselves dispossessed without any benefit to the whole. Book 3, Chapter 15