Top 40 Rafael Sabatini Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Regret of neglected opportunity is the worst hell that a living soul can inhabit.”

— Rafael Sabatini

2. “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”

— Rafael Sabatini

3. “To do what you imply would require nothing short of divine intervention. You must change man, not systems.”

— Rafael Sabatini

4. “Only those become weary of angling who bring nothing to it but the idea of catching fish.”

— Rafael Sabatini

5. “Truth is so often disconcerting.”

— Rafael Sabatini

6. “But they were fated to misunderstand each other.”

— Rafael Sabatini

7. “The love that is never to be realized will often remain a man’s guiding ideal.”

— Rafael Sabatini

8. “What a man dares to do, he should dare to confess- unless he is a coward.”

— Rafael Sabatini

9. “It is a futile and ridiculous struggle – but then... it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.”

— Rafael Sabatini

10. “I admit that it is audacious,” said Scaramouche. “But at your time of life you should have learnt that in this world nothing succeeds like audacity.”

— Rafael Sabatini

11. “Speed will follow when the mechanism of the movements is more assured.”

— Rafael Sabatini

12. “Id is fery boedigal!” he said, his blue eyes twinkling. “Cabdain Blood is fond of boedry – you remember de abble-blossoms. So? Ha, ha!”

— Rafael Sabatini

13. “There remained the sea, which is free to all, and particularly alluring to those who feel themselves at war with humanity.”

— Rafael Sabatini

14. “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

15. “I am afraid, monsieur, you will have to kill me first, and I have a prejudice against being killed before nine o’clock.”

— Rafael Sabatini

16. “If Mr. Blood had condescended to debate the matter with these ladies, he might have urged that having had his fill of wandering and adventuring, he was now embarked upon the career for which he had been originally intended and for which his studies had equipped him; that he was a man of medicine and not of war; a healer, not a slayer.”

— Rafael Sabatini

17. “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

18. “A man may not fear to die, and yet be appalled by the form in which death comes to him.”

— Rafael Sabatini

19. “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

20. “It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden apple-trees on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that man – as he had long suspected – 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

21. “With you it is always the law, never equity.”

— Rafael Sabatini

22. “Only he who is without anything is without enemies.”

— Rafael Sabatini

23. “He was recovering his normal self amazingly under the inspiring stimulus of conflict.”

— Rafael Sabatini

24. “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

25. “Out of his zestful study of Man, from Thucydides to the Encyclopaedists, from Seneca to Rousseau, he had confirmed into an unassailable conviction his earliest conscious impressions of the general insanity of his own species.”

— Rafael Sabatini

26. “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

27. “It does not make me ridiculous simply to be less foul than those about me.”

— Rafael Sabatini

28. “Whilst I’ll take any risk that I must, I’ll take none that I needn’t.”

— Rafael Sabatini

29. “Gold has at all times been considered the best of testimonies of good faith...”

— Rafael Sabatini

30. “A man must sometimes laugh at himself or go mad,’ said he. ‘Few realize it. That is why there are so many madmen in the world.”

— Rafael Sabatini

31. “In life we pay for the evil that in life we do.”

— Rafael Sabatini

32. “I recognize myself for part of this mad world, I suppose. You wouldn’t have me take it seriously? I should lose my reason utterly if I did;.”

— Rafael Sabatini

33. “I am very poor – for a know nothing, understand nothing. It is not a calamitous condition until it is realized.”

— Rafael Sabatini

34. “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

35. “He was suffering from the loss of an illusion.”

— Rafael Sabatini

36. “Inshore, across the pellucid jade-green waters of the bay, gently ruffled by the north-easterly breeze that was sweetly tempering the torrid heat of the sun, rose the ramage of masts and spars of the shipping riding there at anchor.”

— Rafael Sabatini

37. “When all is said, a man’s final judgment of his fellows must be based upon his knowledge of himself.”

— Rafael Sabatini

38. “Evidently not. They are just governing.”

— Rafael Sabatini

39. “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.”

— Rafael Sabatini

40. “Do you wonder that they will.”

— Rafael Sabatini

41. “It is not human to be wise,’ said Blood. ‘It is much more human to err, though perhaps exceptional to err on the side of mercy.”

— Rafael Sabatini