"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 l..."
- Rafael Sabatini
"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 a..."
"Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.' 'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence."
"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."
"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 o..."
"Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured."
"We are all, he says, the sport of destiny. Ah, but not quite. Destiny is an intelligent force, moving with purpose."
"You behold him at the age of four-and-twenty stuffed with learning enough to produce an intellectual indigestion in an ordinary mind."
"I am very poor - for a know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized."
"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 soc..."