Top 120 Patrick O'Brian Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Jack, you’ve debauched my sloth.”

— Patrick O'Brian

2. “Never mind manoeuvres, always go at them.”

— Patrick O'Brian

3. “No man born of woman has ever understood spoken Portuguese.”

— Patrick O'Brian

4. “I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep: perhaps the poor man and the wakeful man have some great moral advantage.”

— Patrick O'Brian

5. “I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.”

— Patrick O'Brian

6. “Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.”

— Patrick O'Brian

7. “There is a systematic flocci-nauci-nihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me.”

— Patrick O'Brian

8. “The sea has receded!’ cried Stephen. ‘I am amazed.’ ‘They tell me it does so twice a day in these parts,’ said Jack. ‘It is technically known as the tide.”

— Patrick O'Brian

9. “Although wealth may not bring happiness, the immediate prospect of it provides a wonderfully close imitation.”

— Patrick O'Brian

10. “That would be locking the horse after the stable door is gone, a very foolish thing to do.”

— Patrick O'Brian

11. “After all a book can be represented as a conversation with one’s demon.”

— Patrick O'Brian

12. “Compulsion is the death of friendship.”

— Patrick O'Brian

13. “I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it.”

— Patrick O'Brian

14. “Invincible ignorance could not be enlightened; and.”

— Patrick O'Brian

15. “We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth.”

— Patrick O'Brian

16. “We are always the most violent against those whom we have injured.”

— Patrick O'Brian

17. “The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.”

— Patrick O'Brian

18. “The sensation of falling into the past is not unlike that of coming home for the holidays.”

— Patrick O'Brian

19. “Other people’s marriages are a perpetual source of amazement.”

— Patrick O'Brian

20. “For me the process works best with no interruptions, no breaks in the steady application, no letters to be answered, very little social life, no holidays; it is therefore a form of happy imprisonment.”

— Patrick O'Brian

21. “For a moment Jack felt the strongest inclination to snatch up his little gilt chair and beat the white-faced man down with it...”

— Patrick O'Brian

22. “I slept as the person in Plutarch that ran from Marathon to Athens without a pause would have slept if he had not fallen dead, the creature.”

— Patrick O'Brian

23. “I do not say that all lawyers are bad, but I do maintain that the general tendency is bad: standing up in a court for whichever side has paid you, affecting warmth and conviction, and doing everything you can to win the case, whatever your private opinion may be, will soon dull any fine sense of honour. The mercenary soldier is not a valued creature, but at least he risks his life, whereas these men merely risk their next fee.”

— Patrick O'Brian

24. “The back of my hand to guilt.”

— Patrick O'Brian

25. “I do not like to sound discontented neither,′ said Pullings, ’nor to crab any ship I belong to; but between you and me, Doctor, between you and me, she is more what we call a floating coffin than a ship.”

— Patrick O'Brian

26. “Yet whether wisdom can be any more profitably pursued than happiness is a question.”

— Patrick O'Brian

27. “When you’re taking a fence on a horse, you don’t think much; your body does all the thinking, and you’re over or you’re not over. It’s much the same when you are doing a tricky thing with a pen. There are times when I’m writing very, very fast.”

— Patrick O'Brian

28. “I am so happy that you saw your epop.”

— Patrick O'Brian

29. “Calligraphy,” said Plato, “is the physical manifestation of an architecture of the soul.” That being so, mine must be a turf-and-wattle kind of soul, since my handwriting would be disowned by a backward cat; whereas yours, particularly on your charts, has a most elegant flow and clarity, the outward form of a soul that might have conceived the Parthenon.”

— Patrick O'Brian

30. “Gluppit the prawling strangles, there!”

— Patrick O'Brian

31. “I am in favour of leaving people alone, however imperfect their polity may seem. It appears to me that you must not tell other nations how to set their house in order; nor must you compel them to be happy.”

— Patrick O'Brian

32. “He that would make a pun would pick a pocket.”

— Patrick O'Brian

33. “It occurred to him that she had spent these last few years entirely among men, seeing no women apart from a few like Louisa Wogan; she spoke rather as men, and somewhat raffish, moneyed, loose-living men, speak when they are alone together. ‘She has forgotten the distinction between what can and what cannot be said,’ he reflected. ‘A few more years of this company, and she would not scruple to fart.”

— Patrick O'Brian

34. “Oh for women at sea to obviate the eternal crosscat-harpings,′ he said to himself, ’to do away with the grumlinfuttocks, and to inject a little civilization, even of an equivocal nature, even at the risk of moral deviation.”

— Patrick O'Brian

35. “Oh, I shall plead guilty at once,’ said Stephen. ‘And I shall add that I was sitting in the powder-magazine with a naked light at the time, imagining the death of the King, wasting my medical stores, smoking tobacco and making a fraudulent return of the portable soup. What solemn nonsense it is’ – laughing heartily – ‘I am surprised so sensible a man as you should attribute any importance to the matter.”

— Patrick O'Brian

36. “Let us drink to the renewed success of Irish arms, and confusion to the Pope.”

— Patrick O'Brian

37. “It would be strange if the weather-gage had to be explained to so old a sea-dog; though I must confess that there was a time when I confused it with that thing which creaks on the roof, showing which way the wind is blowing. Yet could you not obtain this valuable gage by some less arduous means than running a hundred miles and hiding behind a more or less mythical island which no one has ever seen, and that in the dark, a perilous proceeding if ever there was one?”

— Patrick O'Brian

38. “Jack had never been a hypocrite until he became a father, and even now it did not come easy.”

— Patrick O'Brian

39. “Authority is a solvent of humanity: look at any husband, any father of a family, and note the absorption of the person by the persona, the individual by the role. Then multiply the family, and the authority, by some hundreds and see the effect upon a sea-captain, to say nothing of an absolute monarch. Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human; unless it so happens that he is immune to the poison.”

— Patrick O'Brian

40. “Few had much room to cast stones, but hypocrisy has never failed the English middle class in any latitude, and they flung them in plenty with delighted, shocked abandon – rocks, boulders, limited in size only by fear for their husband’s advancement. Conciliating discretion had never been among Mrs Villiers’s qualities, and if subjects for malignant gossip had been wanting she would have provided them by the elephant-load.”

— Patrick O'Brian

41. “He held up two fingers, in case a landman might not fully comprehend so great a number.”

— Patrick O'Brian

42. “Love, sorrow, and wealth are the three things that cannot be concealed.”

— Patrick O'Brian

43. “He cannot hold his wine; he has no head for it. Why, on no more than three glasses, for I absolutely poured him out no more, he was on the point of singing Yankee Doodle. Yankee Doodle, in a King’s ship, upon my sacred honour!”

— Patrick O'Brian

44. “Stephen looked sharply round, saw the decanter, smelt to the sloth, and cried, ‘Jack, you have debauched my sloth.”

— Patrick O'Brian

45. “Come athwart my hawse and I shall ride you down, you half-baked son of an Egyptian fart,’ to a wool-gathering jolly-boat; and art echoed from either shore.”

— Patrick O'Brian

46. “Never mind the disappointment. Salt water will wash it away. You will be amazed how unimportant it will seem in a week’s time – how everything will fall into place.”

— Patrick O'Brian

47. “Whether Mrs Williams liked her daughters at all was doubtful: she loved them, of course, and had ‘sacrificed everything for them’, but there was not much room in her composition for liking – it was too much taken up with being right.”

— Patrick O'Brian

48. “Stephen writhed his neck round, directing a grim look at the young man: all his professional life ashore had been haunted by these vile messengers; innumerable concerts, theatres, operas, dinners, promised treats had been wrecked or interrupted by fools, mooncalves, who, to gain some private end, had broken a leg, had fits, or fallen into a catalepsy.”

— Patrick O'Brian

49. “I know of few men over 50 that seem to me entirely human, virtually none who has long exercised authority.”

— Patrick O'Brian

50. “I would not cross this room to reform parliament or prevent the union or to bring about the millennium... – but man as part of a movement or a crowd is... inhuman... the only feelings I have are for men as individuals; my loyalties, such as they may be, are to private persons alone... Patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.”

— Patrick O'Brian