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

— Rafael Sabatini Scaramouche (1921)

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Notes from Wikiquote

This is the opening line of the novel. Sabatini used it as his epitaph.

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Smile

More quotes by Rafael Sabatini

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

Scaramouche (1921)

Mr Pollexfen was at one and the same time right and wrong—a condition much more common than is generally supposed.

Captain Blood (1922)

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.

Scaramouche (1921)

"It was heroic!"
"Heroic, is it? Bedad, it's epic! Ye begin to perceive the breadth and depth of my genius."

Captain Blood (1922)

"Sir!" she checked him. "I think you are talking treason."
"I hope I am not obscure," said he.

Captain Blood (1922)

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Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.

Albert Einstein Essay to Leo Baeck (1953)

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.

William Hazlitt Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819)

Laughter is the closest thing to the grace of God.

Karl Barth The Harper Book of Quotations (1993)

Care to our coffin adds a nail, no doubt,
And every grin so merry draws one out.

John Wolcot

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Rafael Sabatini (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.