Rafael Sabatini famous quotes

03-28-2025

An intelligent observation of the facts of human existence will reveal to shallow-minded folk who sneer at the use of coincidence in the arts of fiction and drama that life itself is little more than a series of coincidences.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Art #Drama #Intelligent
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.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Reality #Men #Deceit
Thirstily he set it to his lips, and as its cool refreshment began to soothe his throat, he thanked Heaven that in a world of much evil there was still so good a thing as ale.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Beer #Evil #Heaven
He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Life #Happiness #Laughter
A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad,â€™ said he. â€˜Few realize it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Men #Mad #Laughing
But they were fated to misunderstand each other.
-- Rafael Sabatini
Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can inhabit.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Moving On #Regret #Opportunity
The love that is never to be realized will often remain a man's guiding ideal.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#True Love #Men
In life we pay for the evil that in life we do.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Evil #Pay
I am very poor - for a know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Poor
Gold has at all times been considered the best of testimonies of good faith...
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Gold #Testimony #All Time
Only those become weary of angling who bring nothing to it but the idea of catching fish.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Ideas #Catching Fish #Weary
He was suffering from the loss of an illusion.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Loss #Suffering #Illusion
Truth is so often disconcerting.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Truth Is
To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. You must change man, not systems.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Men #Divine #Divine Intervention
It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden apple-trees on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that manâ€”as he had long suspectedâ€”was the vilest work of God, and that only a fool would set himself up as a healer of a species that was best exterminated.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Morning #Men #Blood
There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularly alluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#War #Sea #Humanity
When all is said, a man's final judgment of his fellows must be based upon his knowledge of himself
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Men #Finals #Judgment
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

#Class #Ideas #Envy
Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Fate #Past #Destiny
Do you know, AndrÃ©, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Heart #Thinking #Sometimes
...it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Ridiculous #Human Nature #Humans
Only he who is without anything is without enemies.
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Enemy
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.â€™ â€“ Book 3, Chapter 16
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Book #Men #Hypocrisy
But I like my madness. There is a thrill in it unknown to such sanity as yours. ~ Book 1, Chapter 9,
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Book #Thrill #Madness
They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!
-- Rafael Sabatini

#Philosophy #Ideas #Bayonets

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