Quotes from Rafael Sabatini

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

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

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

Life can be infernally complex,' he said.

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.

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

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

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.

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;

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

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

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.

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

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

You often show yourself without any faculty of deductive reasoning.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

He still had, you see, illusions about Christians.

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.

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.