Scaramouche Quotes

“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“...it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

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

“Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.'
'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. You must change man, not systems.”
― Rafael Sabatini, 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, Scaramouche

“He was suffering from the loss of an illusion.”
― Rafael Sabatini, 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, Scaramouche

“Truth is so often disconcerting.”
― Rafael Sabatini, 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, 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, Scaramouche

“there is no worse hell than that provided by the regrets for wasted opportunities.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess- unless he is a coward.”
― Rafael Sabatini, 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, Scaramouche

“We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose.”
― Rafael Sabatini, 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, 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, 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, Scaramouche

“With you it is always the law, never equity.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“It is a futile and ridiculous struggle—but then... it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.”
― Rafael Sabatini, 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, Scaramouche

“Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“Oh, you are mad!" she exclaimed, quite out of patience.
"Possibly. But I like my madness.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“You often show yourself without any faculty of deductive reasoning.”
― Rafael Sabatini, 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, 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, Scaramouche

“In life we pay for the evil that in life we do.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“I hate possibilities—God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“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.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche

“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.”
― Rafael Sabatini, Scaramouche