Top 120 Patrick O'Brian Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Martin was a thoroughly amiable man, a man of wide reading, but when he came to write he mounted upon a pair of stilts, unusually lofty stilts, and staggered along at a most ungracious pace, with an occasional awkward lurch into colloquialism, giving a strikingly false impression of himself.”

— Patrick O'Brian

102. “The pleasant thing about fighting with the Spaniards, Mr Ellis,’ said Jack, smiling at his great round eyes and solemn face, ’is not that they are shy, for they are not, but that they are never, never ready.”

— Patrick O'Brian

103. “Stephen reflected for some little while on the exact degree of calculated incivility allowed in a well-bred man.”

— Patrick O'Brian

104. “A virtuous esculent!”

— Patrick O'Brian

105. “Rested, shaved, coffee’d, steaked, you will be a different man.”

— Patrick O'Brian

106. “I wonder, James, whether it is not too easy for a rich man to despise money.”

— Patrick O'Brian

107. “Whereas I had not meant anything so illiberal as a national reflexion, of course; only that I hated Papists.”

— Patrick O'Brian

108. “The officer chiefly concerned, Mr Pullings, or the Maiden as the Kutaliotes called him because of his mild face and gentle manners, had but to hint that a wall, outhouse, chimney, dovecote might be in the way for it to vanish, plucked down if not by its owners then by his neighbours and the rest of the community.”

— Patrick O'Brian

109. “Still, the farther hills remained as untouched as the sea; high, remote, arid, dark and sterile, poisoned with the sun.”

— Patrick O'Brian

110. “But when a man puts on maturity and invulnerability, it seems that he necessarily becomes indifferent to many things that gave him joy.”

— Patrick O'Brian

111. “The author says that when an angry impulse is not immediately expressed, it turns to melancholy.”

— Patrick O'Brian

112. “You do not mean there is danger of peace?“, cried Jack.”

— Patrick O'Brian

113. “Where would conversation be, if we were not allowed to exchange our minds freely and to abuse our neighbours from time to time?’ said Stephen.”

— Patrick O'Brian

114. “If men were to consider what they were at – if if they were to look around them, and reflect upon the cost of life in a universe where prisons, brothels, madhouses, and regiments of men armed and trained to kill other men are so very common – why, I doubt we should see many of these poor mewling little larval victims, so often a present misery to their parents and a future menace to their kind.”

— Patrick O'Brian

115. “Well, it is somewhat clearer than the last,’ said Stephen. ‘Though I fancy invidious might answer better than insidious.’ ‘Invidious, of course. I knew there was something not quite shipshape there. Invidious. A capital word: I dare say you spell it with a V?”

— Patrick O'Brian

116. “One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good.”

— Patrick O'Brian

117. “A man’s pillow is his best medicine.”

— Patrick O'Brian

118. “The Surprise’s crew, like most seamen, were a hypochondriacal set of ghouls upon the whole, and they loved a surgical operation almost as much as they loved a prize. But whereas the amputation of a shipmate’s arm or leg had disadvantages of which they were fully sensible, a trepanning had none: the patient had but to survive to have all his former powers restored – to be as good as new, with the glory of a silver plate and an anecdote that would last him and his friends to the grave.”

— Patrick O'Brian

119. “Tomorrow was another day, at least by the calendar, but the two could hardly be told apart: the heat, the faintly drifting cloud, the ship pitching heavily with no way on her, the flaccid sails, were all the same:.”

— Patrick O'Brian

120. “Identity?’ said Jack, comfortably pouring out more coffee. ‘Is not identity something you are born with?’ ‘The identity I am thinking of is something that hovers between a man and the rest of the world: a mid-point between his view of himself and theirs of him – for each, of course, affects the other continually.”

— Patrick O'Brian

121. “How much better a man feels when he is mixed with halibut and leg of mutton and roebuck.”

— Patrick O'Brian

122. “Almost all voyages, from that of Noah’s Ark to the sending of the ships to Troy, have been marked by interminable delays, with false starts and turning wind and tide; perhaps the schooner Ringle was too slim and slight to count as a worthy adversary, because she gently sailed her anchor out of the ground and then bore away a little east of north with a wind that allowed her to spread every sail she possessed, other than those reserved for foul or very foul weather.”

— Patrick O'Brian

123. “Besides, I long for men’s company: the prattle of the little girls – much though I love them – drives me to an earlier and earlier breakfast, to a later and even later dinner, so that presently the two will meet, as they did in Avicenna’s tale.”

— Patrick O'Brian

124. “It was true that a few years ago some wild enthusiast, a Whiggish civilian no doubt, had decreed that day should start at midnight; but Jack, though a scientific, forwardlooking officer, agreed with many of his fellow-captains in giving this foolish innovation no countenance whatsoever: besides, it had taken him years to persuade Stephen that nautical days really did start at noon, and he did not want his imperfect conviction to be shaken in any way at all.”

— Patrick O'Brian

125. “I do hope Diana don’t savage Henage on the way back,′ said Jack, ‘You might not think it, but he is a very sensitive cove, and he feels harsh words extremely. I remember when his father called him a vile concupiscent waste-thrift whoremonger he brooded over it the whole evening.”

— Patrick O'Brian

126. “I dare say they are hauling away the cat before hooking on the fish.’ Pocock said, ‘Perhaps they will stopper with a dog.’ Stephen said, ‘It is my belief that they have raised a mouse, and that having seized it with a fox they will clap on a lizard.”

— Patrick O'Brian

127. “I have noticed that some old men lose their sense of honour, and will cheerfully avow the strangest acts.”

— Patrick O'Brian

128. “Or take me,’ said Jack. ‘I am called captain, but really I am only a master and commander.”

— Patrick O'Brian

129. “Jack broke off. He had seen a very great deal of drunkenness in the Navy; drunken admirals, post-captains, commanders, drunken ship’s boys ten years old, and he had been trundled aboard on a wheelbarrow himself before now; but he disliked it on duty – he disliked it very much indeed, above all at such an hour in the morning.”

— Patrick O'Brian

130. “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

131. “If it is a question of trepanning, I am your man. It is an operation I have performed scores, nay hundreds of times without losing a patient. That is to say except in a very few cases of vicious cachexy, where it was only done to please the relations. I trepanned Mrs Butcher for a persistent migraine, and she has never complained since.”

— Patrick O'Brian

132. “The grief and anxiety did not die away, but of necessity they receded.”

— Patrick O'Brian

133. “They might not be beautiful, but they were certainly suffering.”

— Patrick O'Brian

134. “There is something wonderfully comfortable about having a lady’s legs under one’s table, Aubrey.”

— Patrick O'Brian