Top 40 Emmuska Orczy Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “They seek him here, they seek him there Those Frenchies seek him everywhere Is he in heaven or is he in hell? That demned elusive Pimpernel.”

— Emmuska Orczy

2. “The weariest night, the longest day, sooner or later must perforce come to an end.”

— Emmuska Orczy

3. “We must prove to the world that we are all nincompoops.”

— Emmuska Orczy

4. “A woman’s heart is such a complex problem – the owner thereof is often most incompetent to find the solution to this puzzle.”

— Emmuska Orczy

5. “Thus human beings judge of one another, superficially, casually, throwing contempt on one another, with but little reason, and no charity.”

— Emmuska Orczy

6. “Odd’s fish, m’dear! The man can’t even tie his own cravat!”

— Emmuska Orczy

7. “I shall return, doubt it not. Such love as ours was not created to remain unfulfilled. Whatever may happen, believe and trust in me, as I shall in you, and keep the remembrance of me in your heart without sadness and without regret.”

— Emmuska Orczy

8. “It was asserted that these escapes were organised by a band of Englishmen, whose daring seemed to be unparalleled, and who, from sheer desire to meddle in what did not concern them, spent their spare time in snatching away lawful victims destined for Madame la Guillotine.”

— Emmuska Orczy

9. “It is only when we are very happy that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony, to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay.”

— Emmuska Orczy

10. “She said nothing, and Sir Andrew, too, was silent, yet those two young people understood one another, as young people have a way of doing all the world over, and have done since the world began.”

— Emmuska Orczy

11. “When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness, and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of all our joys.”

— Emmuska Orczy

12. “Shrove Tuesday is the very last day, allowed by our Holy Mother the Church for revelry, before the long austere forty days of Lent, and if we do not make use of her full permission to enjoy ourselves, to the full extent of out capacity, we shall have nothing left to atone for to-morrow, when the good fathers place the cross of ashes on our foreheads, and bid us remember that dust we are, to dust return.”

— Emmuska Orczy

13. “He firmly believed that the French aristocrat was the most bitter enemy of France; he would have wished to see every one of them annihilated: he was one of those who, during this awful Reign of Terror, had been the first to utter the historic and ferocious desire “that aristocrats might have but one head between them, so that it might be cut off with a single stroke of the guillotine.”

— Emmuska Orczy

14. “A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate.”

— Emmuska Orczy

15. “To love, for us men, is to clasp one woman with our arms, feeling that she lives and breathes just as we do, suffers as we do, thinks with us, loves with us, and, above all, sins with us.”

— Emmuska Orczy

16. “There is such wonderful balm in self-imposed sacrifice.”

— Emmuska Orczy

17. “Look at this limp cravet. And the sad state of those cuffs. I can hardly bring myself to look upon them.”

— Emmuska Orczy

18. “Virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when it is crushed.”

— Emmuska Orczy

19. “Sink me! Your taylors have betrayed you! T’wood serve you better to send THEM to Madam Guillotine.”

— Emmuska Orczy

20. “Money and titles may be hereditary,” she would say, “but brains are not,“...”

— Emmuska Orczy

21. “In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny.”

— Emmuska Orczy

22. “She would keep him, keep his love, deserve it and cherish it, for this much was certain, that there was no longer any happiness possible for her without that one man’s love.”

— Emmuska Orczy

23. “Fate is usually swift when she deals a blow.”

— Emmuska Orczy

24. “She, too, had worn a mask in assuming a contempt for him, whilst, as a matter of fact, she completely misunderstood him.”

— Emmuska Orczy

25. “Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless.”

— Emmuska Orczy

26. “He was but a man madly, blindly, passionately in love, and as soon as her light footsteps had died away within the house, he knelt down upon the terrace steps, and in the very madness of his love he kissed one by one the places where her small foot had trodden, and the stone balustrade there, where her tiny hand had rested last.”

— Emmuska Orczy

27. “Your mock saint who stands in a niche is not a woman if she have not suffered, still less a woman if she have not sinned. Fall at the feet of your idol as you wish, but drag her down to your level after that – the only level she should ever reach, that of your heart.”

— Emmuska Orczy

28. “He, the sleepiest, dullest, most British Britisher that had ever set a pretty woman yawning.”

— Emmuska Orczy

29. “In his mind he vaguely pondered whether he should strike that long-legged Englishman in the face and call him a coward, or whether such conduct in a lady’s presence might be deemed ungentlemanly, when Marguerite happily interposed.”

— Emmuska Orczy

30. “Thus human beings judge of one another, with but little reason, and no charity.”

— Emmuska Orczy

31. “The evil we do, Monsieur, is within us; it does not come from circumstance.”

— Emmuska Orczy

32. “It is only when we are very happy, that we can bear to gaze merrily upon the vast and limitless expanse of water, rolling on and on with such persistent, irritating monotony, to the accompaniment of our thoughts, whether grave or gay. When they are gay, the waves echo their gaiety; but when they are sad, then every breaker, as it rolls, seems to bring additional sadness, and to speak to us of hopelessness and of the pettiness of all our joys. CHAPTER.”

— Emmuska Orczy

33. “By her own blindness she had sinned; now she must repay, not by empty remorse, but by prompt and useful action.”

— Emmuska Orczy

34. “No! The captain of the guard was that damned Englishman in disguise, and everyone of his soldiers aristos!” The.”

— Emmuska Orczy

35. “Strange! – I wonder when it got there? It is from the.”

— Emmuska Orczy

36. “No man who has played a role on the world stage has ever been without his detractors, and only a few have been without their apologists.”

— Emmuska Orczy

37. “Mr. Hempseed shook his head with an infinity of wisdom, tempered by deeply-rooted mistrust of the British climate and the British Government.”

— Emmuska Orczy

38. “Among the hard lessons which varying Fortune teaches to those whom she most neglects, there is none so useful as self-control.”

— Emmuska Orczy

39. “Now, in this case, if John Ashley had indeed committed the murder in Regent’s Park in the manner suggested by the police, he would have been a criminal in more senses than one, for idiocy of that kind is to my mind worse than many crimes.”

— Emmuska Orczy

40. “Conventional wisdom holds that Arthur Conan Doyle invented the detective story but in fact Green’s first book featuring detective Ebenezer Gryce – in which Miss Butterworth does not appear – The Leavenworth Case came out in 1878, almost a decade before Sherlock Holmes made his debut in A Study in Scarlet. This is why Green is often referred to as The Mother of the Detective Novel.”

— Emmuska Orczy

41. “The word forgiveness has only been spoken once these past two thousand years, and then it was spoken by Divine lips.”

— Emmuska Orczy

42. “She stood there before them, in all the unconscious insolence of beauty, and.”

— Emmuska Orczy

43. “What did Volenski know of how he stood in the eyes of the Russian police? Living mostly abroad and consorting in a great measure with his own exiled countrymen, some small degree of suspicion was bound to remain attached to his name. He was a Pole, and, being a Pole, he conspired, not because he believed in all the Utopian theories set forth by his brother conspirators, but because it was in his blood to plot and plan against the existing government.”

— Emmuska Orczy

44. “To understand is to forgive...”

— Emmuska Orczy

45. “Honor, my good Armand, is often cruel and seldom human. He is a godlike taskmaster, and we who call ourselves men are all of us his slaves.”

— Emmuska Orczy

46. “That I do not know yet; I have only vague thoughts in my mind. But hate, remember, is a hard and very efficient task-master, and I hate that man, Nicolaes, almost as much as I hate the Prince of Orange. But ’tis the Prince’s death which I want first; because of this my hatred of the rascal must lie dormant just a few days. But it shall lose nothing by waiting, and already I see before me visions of an exemplary revenge which shall satisfy you and gratify my hate.”

— Emmuska Orczy

47. “He knew some things, and talked of a great many more.”

— Emmuska Orczy

48. “During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty and for fraternity. The carnage had only ceased at this late hour of the day because there were other more interesting sights for the people to witness, a little while before the final closing of the barricades for the night.”

— Emmuska Orczy

49. “He seemed to love them: to know how to separate the little good that was in them from that hard crust of evil, which misery had put around their hearts.”

— Emmuska Orczy