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
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.Rafael Sabatini
3
Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.Rafael Sabatini
4
Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured.Rafael Sabatini
5
We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose.Rafael Sabatini
6
You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind.Rafael Sabatini
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.Rafael Sabatini
8
It is a futile and ridiculous struggle–but then... it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.Rafael Sabatini
9
With you it is always the law, never equity.Rafael Sabatini
10
What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess- unless he is a coward.Rafael Sabatini
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.Rafael Sabatini
12
Oh, you are mad! " she exclaimed, quite out of patience." Possibly. But I like my madness.Rafael Sabatini
13
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.Rafael Sabatini