Rafael Sabatini Quotes

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

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.

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

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

Only those become weary of angling who bring nothing to it but the idea of catching fish.

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

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

Truth is so often disconcerting.

He was suffering from the loss of an illusion.

Only he who is without anything is without enemies.

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

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.

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

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

The love that is never to be realized will often remain a man's guiding ideal.

They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!

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

But they were fated to misunderstand each other.

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

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

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

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

With you it is always the law, never equity.

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

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

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

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

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.