Home > Work > Scaramouche (Scaramouche, #1)
1 " 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 , Scaramouche (Scaramouche, #1)
2 " 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. "
3 " Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence. "
4 " Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured. "
5 " We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose. "
6 " You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind. "
7 " 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. "
8 " It is a futile and ridiculous struggle—but then... it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous. "
9 " With you it is always the law, never equity. "
10 " What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess- unless he is a coward. "
11 " 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. "
12 " He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. "
13 " 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. "
14 " I am afraid, monsieur, you will have to kill me first, and I have a prejudice against being killed before nine o'clock. "
15 " ...it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous. "
16 " But I like my madness. There is a thrill in it unknown to such sanity as yours. ~ Book 1, Chapter 9, "
17 " He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony. "
18 " To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. You must change man, not systems. "
19 " 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 "
20 " Truth is so often disconcerting. "