Rafael Sabatini

“You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind.”

“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.”

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

“I desire a society which selects its rulers from the best elements of every class and denies the right of any class or corporation to usurp the government itself--whether it be the nobles, the clergy, the bourgeoisie, or the proletariat. For government by any class is fatal to the welfare of the whole,”

“Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured.”

“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.”

“I am very poor - for a know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Mind being the seat of the soul, and literature being the expression of the mind, literature, it follows, is the soul of an age, the surviving and immortal part of it.”