Quotes about duel (48 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Secret of Father Brown

The Father Brown Mystery Series (1910 - 1927)
Source: The Secret of Father Brown (1927) The Chief Mourner of Marne

Forgiveness , Thinking

“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Death , Fight

“I thoroughly disapprove of duels. I consider them unwise and I know they are dangerous. Also, sinful. If a man should challenge me now I would go to that man and take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet retired spot and kill him.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

In revised edition, Vol. I, "Friday, January 19, 1906, About Dueling.", p. 298, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, 1959, Charles Neider, Harper & Row
Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924)

“I've never lost a duel to the death. Not one.”

Jim Butcher Captain's Fury

Source: Captain's Fury

Death

“We then saw what St. Jerome said of those who serve God and those who serve the world: "Each to the other we seem insane": Invicem insanire videmur. There is a never-ending duel between the two.”

Jean De La Fontaine (1621–1695) French poet, fabulist and writer.

Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de Port-Royal (1752), as cited by M. A. Screech in Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (1997), p. 69

God , World

“The great duel, the mother of all battles has begun.… The dawn of victory nears as this great showdown begins!”

Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) Iraqi politician and President

Broadcast on Baghdad state radio, January 17, 1991.
Comment on the beginning of Desert Storm, quoted in Washington Post (17 January 1991) "Iraqi Leader Remains Defiant Following US-Led Air Attacks" by Nora Boustany

Victory

“Because Anno Domini, in the Year of Our Lord, is fine for Christians, but Thor gets a little upset. He still holds a grudge that Jesus never showed up for that duel he challenged him to.” “Say what now?”

Rick Riordan book The Sword of Summer

Source: The Sword of Summer

“Love this job," Sanya murmured. "Just love it."
"I need to challenge more people to duels," Thomas said in agreement.
"Men are pigs," Murphy said.
"Amen," said Molly.
Lea gave me a prim look and said, "I've not sacrificed a holy virgin in ages.”

Jim Butcher book Changes

Source: Changes

Love , Men , People , Age

“Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation’s tears in shoulder blades.”

Borís Pasternak (1890–1960) Russian writer

LIFE magazine (13 June 1960)

Tear , Night

“I won the only duel I ever lost.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being defeated.”

Charles Baudelaire book Le Spleen de Paris

L'étude du beau est un duel où l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'être vaincu.
III: "Le Confiteor de l'artiste" http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Petits_Po%C3%A8mes_en_prose_-_III._Le_Confiteor_de_l%27artiste
Le Spleen de Paris (1862)
Source: Twenty Prose Poems

Beauty , Study

“Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare and tropical fish.”

Raymond Chandler book The Simple Art of Murder

Source: The Simple Art of Murder

People , Fish

“You both… you both saved me?"

"Come on," said Luis. "You make it sound like it was hard for Val to go to the Unseelie Court, strike a deal with Roiben, challenge Mabry to a duel, win back your heart, and then get back here during rush hour.”

Holly Black (1971) American children's fiction writer

Source: Valiant

Heart

“A duel, a duel, a duel. Is there anything more exciting, more romantic… or more utterly moronic?”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: The Duke and I

“The monster I kill every day is the monster of realism. The monster who attacks me every day is destruction. Out of the duel comes the transformation. I turn destruction into creation over and over again.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Source: Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love"--The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin

“You weren't able to talk sense into him?"
Well, we kind of tried to kill each other in a duel to the death."
I see. You tried the diplomatic approach.”

Rick Riordan book The Sea of Monsters

Source: The Sea of Monsters

Death , Sense

“All of those faeries and duels and mad queens and so on, and no one quoted old Billy Shakespeare. Not even once.”

Jim Butcher book Summer Knight

Source: Summer Knight

Quotes , Madness

“Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked up at each other for the last time.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Love , Kiss , Time

“We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Love , Time

“I challenge you to a duel!” screamed the cat, sailing over their heads on the swinging chandelier.”

Mikhail Bulgakov book The Master and Margarita

Source: The Master and Margarita

Cats

“The duel went on for three days, but it ended in our victory in a matter of seconds. The German was well prepared for it. He had liquidated two Soviet snipers before that. But, with the help of my comrades-in-arms, also snipers whose positions were next to mine, I managed to slay him. I did not know what kind of sniper had been brought to Stalingrad, but when we pulled him out of his shelter we discovered that he was the chief of the school for snipers based in Berlin. On the whole I liquidated 242 Nazis in Stalingrad. My friends and pupils also eliminated many of them. I had trained 30 snipers who killed 1126 Nazis during the war.”

Vasily Zaytsev (1915–1991) Soviet sniper

War , School , Victory , Help

“Those who attended [the annual meeting] last year saw your Chairman pitch to Ernie Banks. This encounter proved to be the titanic duel that the sports world had long awaited. After the first few pitches — which were not my best, but when have I ever thrown my best? — I fired a brushback at Ernie just to let him know who was in command. Ernie charged the mound, and I charged the plate. But a clash was avoided because we became exhausted before reaching each other.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1999 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/final1999pdf.pdf
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

World , Sport

“I care little about the sword: I will allow a thing to struggle for itself in this world, with any sword or tongue or implement it has, or can lay hold of. We will let it preach, and pamphleteer, and fight, and to the uttermost bestir itself, and do, beak and claws, whatsoever is in it; very sure that it will, in the long-run, conquer nothing which does not deserve to be conquered. What is better than itself, it cannot put away, but only what is worse. In this great Duel, Nature herself is umpire, and can do no wrong: the thing which is deepest-rooted in Nature, what we call truest, that thing and not the other will be found growing at last.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Prophet

World , Nature , Fight

“Could she not obtain from him the promise to discharge his weapon in the air, if the duel was with pistols, or, if it was with swords, simply to disarm his enemy?
Like nearly all persons unversed in the art, she believed in infallible fencers, in marksmen who never missed their aim, and she had also ideas profoundly, absolutely inexact on the relations of one man with another in the matter of an insult.”

Paul Bourget (1852–1935) French writer

Source: Cosmopolis (1892), Ch. 7 "A Little Relative of Iago"

Art , Idea , Personality

“Being in Germany in the 1940s brought back recollections of my first visit long before as a Boy Scout, when I had had my first encounter with German appreciation of dueling. As as child I had been cut severely on the left cheek when thrown through the windshield of my father's car in a head-on collision, and a prominent scar remained. Traveling in Germany as a youth, I was perplexed when college students would tip their beanie hats as they passed until at last I discerned that they mistook the scar on my cheek for a dueling scar.”

William Westmoreland book A Soldier Reports

A Soldier Reports (1976)

Youth , Cars , Travel , Boy

“I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel.”

Zell Miller (1932–2018) Politician and United States Marine Corps officer

To Chris Matthews on Hardball after his speech at the 2004 RNC, September 1, 2004.

Personality

“There's a perpetual duel going on between the world of the spirit and the world of things. Although the one only has meaning in relation to the other.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

1960's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde' (1965 - 1969)

World

“Gilt-tooled on yard-square panels of green leather—imitation, of course—the zodiacal signs looked down from the walls of the executive lunch-room. The air was full of the chatter of voices and the clink of ice-cubes. Waiting to be attacked when the president of the company joined them (he had promised to show at one sharp) was a table laden with expensive food: hard-boiled eggs, shells intact so that it could be seen they were brown, free-range, rich in carotene; lettuces whose outer leaves had been rasped by slugs; apples and pears wearing their maggot-marks like dueling scars, in this case presumably genuine ones though it had been known for fruit growers to fake them with red-hot wires in areas where insects were no longer found; whole hams, very lean, proud of their immunity from antibiotics and copper sulphate; scrawny chickens; bread as coarse as sandstone, dark as mud and nubbled with wheat grains...”

John Brunner book The Sheep Look Up

December “HOUSE TO HOUSE”
The Sheep Look Up (1972)

Food , Waiting

“[this letter concerns the naval duel in which HMS Flora captured the French navy frigate Nymphe] When Capt. Williams had conquered the crew, they found sixty dead upon deck;- the two ships exhibited a scene more like a slaughter-house, than any thing imaginable- These, oh Christians! are the features of war- and thus Most Christian Kings and Defenders of Faith shew their zeal and love for the dying commands of their Divine Master”

Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) British composer, writer and grocer

(from vol 2, letter 78: 18 Aug 1780, to J___ S___ esq.).

Love , War , Faith , Imagination

“…[A]ll duels followed a pattern. They began with heat and fury, then settled into a contest of wills. With two equally matched opponents there would come a time when the worm of doubt entered the equation. The truly skilled recognized such moments, and fed them. It was at this time that the endgame would begin.”

David Gemmell book Stormrider

Source: Rigante series, Stormrider, Ch. 7

Time

“Looking back on the long-stretched-out body of one's work, it is interesting to mark the endless duel fought within a man between the emotional and critical sides of his nature, first one, then the other, getting the upper hand, and too seldom fusing till the result has the mellowness of full achievement. One can even tell the nature of one's readers, by their preference for the work which reveals more of this side than of that.”

John Galsworthy (1867–1933) English novelist and playwright

Preface to Villa Rubein and Other Stories (1923)

Nature

“Richard resumed reading the T’Rain Gazette, a daily newspaper (electronic format, of course)… which summarized what had been going on all over T’Rain during the preceding twenty-four hours:
Notable achievements, wars, duels, sackings, mortality statistics, plagues, famines…untoward spikes in commodity prices.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 1
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

War , Reading

“On the diamond, I had been rough on Babe. I'd never taken my spurs out of his hide and one day he'd come looking for me in the Detroit clubhouse with fistic mayhem in mind. We'd won and lost duels to each other way back since 1915, when Babe had been a rookie pitcher with Bill Carrigan's Boston Red Sox. To add heat to the situation, some press association or other was always holding a poll to pick between Ruth and Cobb as the all-time star player.”

Ty Cobb (1886–1961) American baseball player

On Babe Ruth, in Ch. 16 : The Babe and I, p. 214
My Life In Baseball : The True Record (1961)

Way , Star , Time

“The Marques' thought he had the Rifleman beaten, but all he had done was to make the Rifleman fight. This no longer looked like a duel to d'Alembord; it looked like a brawl leading to slaughter.”

Bernard Cornwell (1944) British writer

Captain Peter d'Alembord, p. 65
Sharpe (Novel Series), Sharpe's Honor (1985)

Fight

“Love is not the sacred thing that poets talk about … Love is an illusion; it is the world's greatest mistake. I ought to know for I've been loved as no other woman of my time has been loved. Men have threatened suicide, they have taken poison, they have fought duels for me. All kinds have come to me — geniuses, poets, millionaires, artists, musicians — but now there is not one to whom I have appealed for the loan of £25 who have responded.
There is love for you!”

Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) American dancer and choreographer

As quoted in A Century of Sundays : 100 years of Breaking News in the Sunday Papers (2006) by Nadine Dreyer, p. 65 http://books.google.com/books?id=5rFGX4z8-S8C&pg=PA65&dq=%22Love+is+an+illusion;+it+is+the+world's+greatest+mistake%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NPAkT7mJDJKy0AH5vcXkCA&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Love%20is%20an%20illusion%3B%20it%20is%20the%20world's%20greatest%20mistake%22&f=false

Love , Men , World , Suicide