Quotes from book

Scaramouche

“… it is human nature, I suppose, to be futile and ridiculous.”

“Do you expect sincerity in man when hypocrisy is the very keynote of human nature? We are nurtured on it; we are schooled in it, we live by it; and we rarely realize it.”

“But I like my madness. There is a thrill in it unknown to such sanity as yours.”

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

“Do you know, André, I sometimes think that you have no heart.'
'Presumably because I sometimes betray intelligence.”

“Truth is so often disconcerting.”

“Bestir, ladies! To your chaise, and see that you contrive to look your best. Soon the eyes of Guichen will be upon you, and the condition of your interior to-morrow will depend upon the impression made by your exterior to-day.”

“They opposed brute force to reason and philosophy, and battalions of foreign mercenaries to ideas. As if ideas were to be impaled on bayonets!”

“You have changed a certainty into a possibility, and I hate possibilities — God of God! I have lived on possibilities, and infernally near starved on them.”

“When we know all of whatever it may be, we can never do anything but forgive, madame. That is the profoundest religious truth that was ever written. It contains, in fact, a whole religion—the noblest religion any man could have to guide him.”