Emmuska Orczy Quotes

Hers was the perfect love that dwells on the other's happiness, and not on its own. She knew that, though for the time being he would find bliss and oblivion in her arms, he would soon repine in inactivity whilst others fought for that which he held sublime.

Is it love to worship a saint in heaven, whom you dare not touch, who hovers above you like a cloud, which floats away from you even as you gaze? To love is to feel one being in the world at one with us, our equal in sin as well as in virtue. To love, for us men, is to clasp one woman with our arms, feeling that she lives and breathes just as we do, suffers as we do, thinks with us, loves with us, and, above all, sins with us. Your mock saint who stands in a niche is not a woman if she have not suffered, still less a woman if she have not sinned. Fall at the feet of your idol an you wish, but drag her down to your level after that- the only level she should ever reach, that of your heart.

The invigorating scent of the sea was nectar to her wearied body, the immensity of the lonely cliffs was silent and dreamlike. Her brain only remained conscious of its ceaseless, its intolerable torture of uncertainty.

Sport, Madame la Comtesse, sport," asserted Lord Antony, with his jovial, loud and pleasant voice; "we are a nation of sportsmen, you know, and just now it is the fashion to pull the hare from between the teeth of the hound." "Ah,

She had seen them in turmoil all round her
love, hatred, vengeance, treachery
she herself practically the pivot around which they raged. Out of the deadly strife she had emerged pure, happy in the arms of the man whom her wondrous adventures as much as his brilliant personality had taught her to love.

Look at this limp cravet. And the sad state of those cuffs. I can hardly bring myself to look upon them.

From the railway station far away the sharp clang of a bell...In half an hour the train starts, and there is so much still to say that has been left unsaid...The mothers, fearful and fussy, look for their sons in among the crowd like hens in search of their chicks; their wizened faces are hard and wrinkled like winter apples, they carry huge baskets on their arms, over-filled with the last delicacies which their fond, toil-worn hands will prepare for the beloved son for the next three years:--a piece of smoked bacon, a loaf of rye bread, a cake of maize-flour.

The gypsies have struck up a melancholy Magyar folksong: the crowd breaks up in isolated groups, mothers and father with their sons whisper in the dark corners of the bran. The father who did his service thirty years ago gives sundry good advice - no rebellion, quiet obedience, no use complaining or grumbling, the three years are quickly over. The mother begs her darling not to give way to drink, and not to get entangled with one of the hussies in the towns; women and wine, the two besetting temptations that assail the Magyar peasant - let the darling boy resist both for his sorrowing mother's sake.

But in every century, and ever since England has been what it is, an Englishman has always felt somewhat ashamed of his own emotion and of his own sympathy.

In his mind he vaguely pondered whether he should strike that long-legged Englishman in the face and call him a coward, or whether such conduct in a lady's presence might be deemed ungentlemanly, when Marguerite happily interposed.

She said nothing, and Sir Andrew, too, was silent, yet those two young people understood one another, as young people have a way of doing all the world over, and have done since the world began.

Among the hard lessons which varying Fortune teaches to those whom she most neglects, there is none so useful as self-control.

Dear heart," he murmured, "do not look on me with those dear, scared eyes of yours. If there is aught that puzzles you in what I said, try and trust me a little longer. Remember, I must save the Dauphin at all costs; mine honor is bound with his safety. What happens to me after that matters but little, yet I wish to live for your dear sake.

When a country goes mad, it has the right to commit every horror in its own wall

Now, in this case, if John Ashley had indeed committed the murder in Regent's Park in the manner suggested by the police, he would have been a criminal in more senses than one, for idiocy of that kind is to my mind worse than many crimes.

By her own blindness she had sinned; now she must repay, not by empty remorse, but by prompt and useful action.

No man who has played a role on the world stage has ever been without his detractors, and only a few have been without their apologists.

It is only in our beautiful France that wholesale slaughter is done lawfully, in the name of liberty and of brotherly love

The evil we do, Monsieur, is within us; it does not come from circumstance.

She looks very virtuous and very melancholy."
"Virtue is like the precious odors, most fragrant when it is crushed.

My wits supply, sir, what my sword cannot always command.

Only he who has ever by accident sniffed vigorously a dose of pepper, can have the faintest conception of the hopeless condition in which such a sniff would reduce any human being.

Since then her life had been peaceful and happy. She had allowed herself to be worshipped by that strangely captivating lover of hers, whose passionately willful temperament, tempered by that persistent, sunny gaiety, she had up to now only half understood.

Strange! - I wonder when it got there? It is from the

Money and titles may be hereditary," she would say, "but brains are not," ...

Virtue is like precious odours, most fragrant when it is crushed.

Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless.

No! The captain of the guard was that damned Englishman in disguise, and everyone of his soldiers aristos! The

The present is not so glorious but that I should wish to dwell a little in the past.

Your conscience troubles you unnecessarily, and you see a deliberate intention in every simple act.

It does seem simple, doesn't it?' she said, with a final bitter attempt at flippancy, 'when you want to kill a chicken ... you take hold of it ... then you wring its neck ... it's only the chicken who does not find it quite so simple. Now you hold a knife at my throat, and a hostage for my obedience ... You find it simple ... I don't

I have so often been asked the question: "But how did you come to think of The Scarlet Pimpernel?" And my answer has always been: "It was God's will that I should." And to you moderns, who perhaps do not believe as I do, I will say, "In the chain of my life, there were so many links, all of which tended towards bringing me to the fulfillment of my destiny.

They seek him here, they seek him there
Those Frenchies seek him everywhere
Is he in heaven or is he in hell?
That demned elusive Pimpernel

Thus human beings judge of one another, superficially, casually, throwing contempt on one another, with but little reason, and no charity.

And in repose one might have admired so fine a specimen of English manhood, until the foppish ways, the affected movements, the perpetual inane laugh, brought one's admiration of Sir Percy Blakeney to an abrupt close.

She, too, had worn a mask in assuming a contempt for him, whilst, as a matter of fact, she completely misunderstood him

Suddenly ... a sound ... the strangest, undoubtedly, that these lonely cliffs of France had ever heard, broke the silent solemnity of the shore. So strange a sound was it that the gentle breeze ceased to murmur, the tiny pebbles to roll down the steep incline! So strange, that Marguerite, wearied, overwrought as she was, thought that the beneficial unconsciousness of the approach of death was playing her half-sleeping senses a weird and elusive trick. It was the sound of a good, solid, absolutely British Damn!

A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying monument to the nation's glory and his own vanity.

Mr Jellyband was indeed a typical rural John Bull of those days
the days when our prejudiced insularity was at its height, when to an Englishman, be he lord, yeoman, or peasant, the whole of the continent of Europe was a den of immorality and the rest of the world an unexploited land of savages and cannibals.

You call him treacherous now, but you loved him once.' 'It is because I loved him once,' she rejoined earnestly, 'that I call him treacherous now.

Even the sparrows on the house-tops are objects of suspicion.

Sink me! Your taylors have betrayed you! T'wood serve you better to send THEM to Madam Guillotine

Love, the great, the strong, the conquering god
Love that subdues a world, and rides roughshod over principle, virtue, tradition, over home, kindred, and religion
what cares he for the easy conquest of the pathetic being, who appeals to his sympathy?
Love means equality
the same height of heroism or of sin. When Love stoops to pity, he has ceased to soar in the boundless space, that rarefied atmosphere wherein man feels himself made at last truly in the image of God.

You know my belief in bald-headed Fortune, with the one solitary hair. Well, I meant to grab that hair ...

A woman's heart is such a complex problem - the owner thereof is often most incompetent to find the solution to this puzzle.

Had he but turned back then, and looked out once more on to the rose-lit garden, she would have seen that which would have made her own sufferings seem but light and easy to bear
a strong man, overwhelmed with his own passion and despair. Pride had given way at last, obstinacy was gone: the will was powerless. He was but a man madly, blindly, passionately in love and as soon as her light footstep had died away within the house, he knelt down upon the terrace steps, and in the very madness of his love he kissed one by one the places where her small foot had trodden, and the stone balustrade, where her tiny hand had rested last.

The moral crisis she'd just gone through made her feel indulgent toward the faults, the delinquencies of others. How thoroughly a human being can be buffeted and over-mastered by fate had been borne in upon her with appalling force.

During the greater part of the day the guillotine had been kept busy at its ghastly work: all that France had boasted of in the past centuries, of ancient names, and blue blood, had paid toll to her desire for liberty and for fraternity.

She, at least, ought to have known that he was wearing a mask, and having found that out, she should have torn it from his face, whenever they were alone together ... Her love for him had been paltry and weak, easily crushed by her own pride

She would keep him, keep his love, deserve it and cherish it, for this much was certain, that there was no longer any happiness possible for her without that one man's love.

His pride and her beauty had been in direct conflict, and his pride had remained the conqueror.

He made her laugh always made her taste a strange and exquisite bliss when he held her in his arms.

The chairs - turned towards one another in groups of twos and threes - seemed like the seats of ghosts in close conversation with one another. There were sets of two chairs - very close to one another - in the far corners of the room, which spoke of recent whispered flirtations, over cold game pie and iced champagne; there were sets of three and four chairs, that recalled pleasant animated discussions over the latest scandals; there were chairs straight up in a row that still looked starchy, critical, acid, like antiquated dowagers; there were a few isolated, single chairs, close to the table, that spoke of gourmands intent on the most recherche dishes, and others overturned on the floor, that spoke volumes on the subject of my Lord Grenville's cellars.

that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. The hour, some little time before sunset, and the place, the West Barricade, at the very spot where, a decade later, a proud tyrant raised an undying

We must prove to the world that we are all nincompoops