Twelve Against the Gods Quotes

“People who are not enjoying themselves very much always most dislike risking their lives.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“It is when the pirates count their booty, that they become mere thieves.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“The adventurer, by minimum definition, is an individualist. The life of adventure is an unsocial game; therefore in direct contrast with the married, supported life which is nuclear society itself.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“In his stay with the cultured old epicure, Casanova had learnt two Latin saws, which were to be for the rest of his life his gospel and his policy: Fata viam inveniunt. Volentem ducit, nolentem trahit. As we may say : Fate finds the way, and Life leads its lover, betrays its rebel.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“The direction of this new force, liberated by the love, vanity, and inspiration of a sharp little shop assistant, was through the spirit of the times to a personal power that were content to wish as large as possible, without any limitation or detailed idea. This spirit, since it was the Age of Reason, was love of Mystery. For it cannot be disguised that the prime effect of knowledge of the universe in which we are shipwrecked is a feeling of despair and disgust, often developing into an energetic desire to escape reality altogether. The age of Voltaire is also the age of fairy tales; the vast Cabinet de Fèes, some volumes of which Marie Antoinette took into her cell to console her, it is said, stood alongside the Encyclopèdie ... This impression of disgust, and this impulse to escape were naturally very strong in the eighteenth century, which had come to a singularly lucid view of the truth of the laws that govern our existence, the nature of mankind, its passions and instincts, its societies, customs, and possibilities, its scope and cosmical setting and the probable length and breadth of its destinies. This escape, since from Truth, can only be into Illusion, the sublime comfort and refuge of that pragmatic fiction we have already praised. There is the usual human poverty of all its possible varieties ... there are all the drugs, from subtle, all conquering opium to cheating, cozening cocaine. There is religion, of course, and music, and gambling; these are the major euphorias. But the queerest and oldest is the sidepath of Magic... At its deepest, this Magic is concerned with the creative powers of the will; at lowest it is but a barbarous rationalism, the first of all our attempts to force the heavens to be reasonable.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“He (Cicero) made Catiline and his conspiracy actually simple; the man himself had the courage to sit in front of him and listen, and at the end, it seemed as if he had exposed Catiline even to himself.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“And he loved her—with the exalted and romantic intensity that a social climber gives to a woman whom he thinks superior to his own class.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“Like most people of his temperament, though sociable, he (Napolean) disliked company in which he would have to appear merely as one of the crowd, even if not definitely as an inferior”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“He had come to prospect the intentions of Charles towards the French and the Anglo-Austrian coalition, and even if Charles had thrown his jack-boot at his head, it would not have disturbed him from his mission. Marlborough was a slow negotiator. He was never in a hurry to make propositions or ask questions, preferring under cover of a banal conversation to use his extremely acute faculties of observation, and his art of unraveling other men’s
motives, as it were, sideways. The ablest diplomat will never boast of understanding a man, but only his intentions.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“And so begins the strangest campaign in military history : a competent general and a seasoned army of eighty thousand men chased like deer, in their own country, by an invader who used his vastly smaller forces more like a pack of hunting dogs than men; laying them on the scent rather than mapping routes, caring no more for their feelings, their fatigues, their lives, than a hunter who is rather fond of a good dog. Up and down the map of East Germany they ran, hunter and hunted, in an Alexandrian zig-zag of the best manner. The only strategical question in Charles’ science was “ Where are they ? ” Never, “ How many ? How entrenched ? ” At last Charles had made war into what schoolboys dreamed it ought to be.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“The truth is that he (Casanova) had ceased subtly to be an adventurer to become a noisy scoundrel, or if that is too harsh, that he had no longer the irresistible charm of being the world’s best loser. He was always greedy. Now he was grasping. He was always noticeable. Now he was loud. He had become without knowing it a social man, desperately interested in the stability of his own position which he tried, without knowing how to do it, to link up with the stability of society. He had become a fortune hunter, and shrank from the quest of chance; the supernatural shine had left his eyes. Men saw in him no longer Puck, but a rival.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“Casanova had no ordinary shame”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“Here, in Egypt, the morning of Alexander’s adventure ends. Henceforth he is divided; Alexandria is his first possession and he is no longer free.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“His prime secret is in his own words. “I have always believed that when a man gets it into his head to do something, and when he exclusively occupies himself in that design, he must succeed whatever the difficulties. That man will become Grand Vizier or Pope. He will upset a dynasty, provided he starts young and has the brain and perseverance necessary. For when a man has arrived at the age that Chance despises he can no longer do anything; for without her aid there is no hope.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods: The Story of Adventure

“It is said of Copeland of Harvard that he once remarked when he was asked whether he had enjoyed a tea party that “if I had not been there I should have been very much bored.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods: The Story of Adventure

“In politics, where everything romantic and sentimental is folly, the converse is usually considered true, and every brutality is thought sound sense”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“The whole plot was a sinister drollery, the simple delight of stirring up great crowds to die and kill, of one who could not be swayed by anything himself; the anticipation of the spectacle of fear by one who was terrified at nothing. The vice of a man who had become inhuman by losing his human greed.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“Napoleon taught the world, or perhaps only satisfied a latent longing and gave it shape and hope, to want to be rewarded, visibly, definitely, let us say inorganically, for its deeds. Curiously enough, this mode of thought is even commoner among women than men ; the postulation of an infallible judge somewhere, somehow, who will examine work done and measure it exactly and register it in a stepped list of rewards.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“Who can enjoy acting in an empty theater ?”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“They, whether steel kings or Bonapartes, cannot, after a certain age, endure solitude. For it is the solitude, even though strictly relative in the majority of cases, that kills them, or sends them on the road to Waterloo.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“The sacrilegious moment had come for counting and preserving; and the gods are insulted. Everything after this moment goes mysteriously awry, as heretofore it had gone mysteriously right.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“To a Bonaparte it represents what Jacob Astor meant when he said, “The first hundred thousand dollars are the most difficult.” It is the beginning, the possibility of a fortune, not a fortune itself. With it, Bonaparte, the greedy little soldier, could go to Paris and begin the story.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“Napoleon fell into the situation that is the misery of many men of action, and lost the power of enjoying things directly, by himself. It is a weakness, a gustatory impotence which is felt the whole length of the moral ladder, from the saint to the voyeur. It is the secret inspiration of much philanthropy and of much vice; shared by a Napoleon and by the tired cook who has lost her appetite over the stove, and can only get pleasure from the good things she has made vicariously, watching the other eat.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“They lived autobiographies”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“In its greatest moments, memory seems to desert human beings ; only tiny ordinary events leave clear detailed trace. Probably none at the pitch of exaltation which Charles and his men had reached had any remembrance of what happened; we can be supermen only on condition of going into a trance. The result alone is related”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“All these outposts were broken in,and that which in other histories would have counted as three victories did not delay the progress of Charles for one hour”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“But the better the training, the greater and more detailed the preparation, the more men are at the mercy of the impossible.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“He fought with Augustus and Peter, not with Russia or Poland. He aimed at full apologies, not conquests.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“Such is the arithmetic of adventure, in which two and two no more make only four than that Euclid rules in the Universe of Einstein. Nothing or a million; a fool’s death in the Sound, or the leadership of an army that would have scattered the Greeks at Thermopylae at the first chairge. Like the absurd maps of Columbus, the absurd rules of Alexanderism had led him straight.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods

“But not of course in the same condition as heretofore. There is a miraculous bonus in the hunt for the miraculous, as you have noticed before in all these heroes; at every turn of the impossible road is waiting an impossible good, unearned; a present.”
― William Bolitho, Twelve Against the Gods