“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.”
Rafael Sabatini book Scaramouche
This is the opening line of the novel. Sabatini used it as his epitaph.
Variant: He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. And that was all his patrimony.
Source: Scaramouche (1921), Ch. I: "The Republican"