"I would not, for we understand each other, and I shall have her until one of us dies. That might be arranged. Then plan it well, Byzantine, for death is a visitor who can call upon any man."

"Are we not all slaves, occasionally? To custom? To a situation? To an idea? Who among us it truly free, Byzantine?"

"Perhaps the blood here is thinning now, and perfume appreciated more than sweat."

"Had I asked in any of those cities, would anyone have believed they someday would lie in ruins? Each age is an age that is passing, and cities, my friend, are transitory things. Each is born from the dust; each matures, grows older, then it fades and dies. A passing traveler looks at a mound of sand and broken stones and asks 'What was here?' and his answer is only an echo or a wind drifting sand."

"What road has not left its dust upon my feet?"

"My mind is my sword, and if you linger you shall feel its edge."

"I drink the wine and put aside the glass, but the taste lingers, Lolyngton, the taste lingers!""

"He is a wise man who can choose the moment. It is not necessary to die to prove you are brave."

"How easily, at such a time, are promises made! And how vain the promises when destiny hangs in the balance!"

"Even if we win, it will be an end of this, and it is a pity that every beginning should also be an end. I shall miss the walking drum, Suzanne, miss it indeed. That drum has been our pulse, and often have I wondered what it is that starts the drum of a man's life to beating? For each of us walks to the beat of our own drum, an unheard rhythm to all our movements and thought."

"Suzanne, a wise man fights to win, but he is twice a fool who has no plan for possible defeat."

"Where there is gold, there is blood."

"Stand aside, I said! Or I shall spill your innards and walk over them to the room.-Count Robert If you come up these stairs, we shall see whose innards lie upon them. Come if you wish. You can bite on this steel.-Mathurin I do not fight with commoners. These do it for me. -Count Robert An excuse for cowardice.-Mathurin Kill him. - Count Robert If they advance one step, I shall hang the lot of them, and you higher than the rest. I am the Hansgraf Rupert von Gilderstern, of the White Company of traders. This man [Mathurin] is a merchant of our company. -Rupert von Gilderstern I have thirty men! -Count Robert I have five times that number. They are veterans of more than three hundred battles, Count Robert. Any five of my men would take your thirty and spit them like frogs. If you have had no experience of war with a merchant caravan, Count Robert, this will be a lesson to you, a lesson you would not live to appreciate. -Rupert von Gilderstern"

"Adding, for my own information, that I did not intend to die. Too much remained to be done."

"Barons, my Comtesse, bleed as easily as merchants or peasants. This one bled like the thief he was."

"The soul of business is to inspire people to buy that which they neither need nor want."

"Trade is much superior to piracy. You can rob and kill a man but once, but you can cheat him again and again."

"There are many ways of fighting. Many a man or woman has waged a good war for truth, honor, and freedom, who did not shed his blood in the process. Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is the violence they want and neither truth nor freedom. The important thing is to know where you stand and what you believe, then be true to yourself in all things. Moreover, it is foolish to waste time in arguing questions with those who have no power to change."

"Think a little, Julot. All our lives we compromise, and without it there would be no progress, nor could men live together. You may think a man a fool, but if he is an agreeable fool you say nothing. Is that no compromise?""

"Be a philosopher. A man can compromise to gain a point. It has become apparent that a man can, within limits, follow his inclination within the arms of the Church if he does so discreetly. Remember this, Julot, even a rebel grows old, and sometimes wiser. He finds the things he rebelled against are now the things he must defend against newer rebels. Aging bones creak in the cold. Seek warmth, my friend; be discreet, but follow your own mind. When you have obtained position you will have influence. Otherwise you will tear at the bars until your strength is gone, and you will have accomplished nothing but to rant and rave."

"The companion of vagabonds. Few men are so poor they cannot have fire."

"The radical ideas of today are often the conservative policies of tomorrow, and dogma is left protesting by the wayside."

"To die for what one believes is all very well for those so inclined, but it has always seemed to me the most vain of solutions. There is not a cause worthy dying for that is not better served by living."

"That man is a fool who would descend into a well on another man's rope."

"Blasphemy? Not unless it is blasphemy to seek the truth. No, I am no blasphemer, but something worse, I am an asker of questions."

"Aye, he would cheat his own mother, and willingly, if he could have a coin by doing it."

"On that I had no comment, for the future is the future, and I place no trust in the reading of the stars."

"Reading without thinking is as nothing, for a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes you think."

"Have you heard about the Devil quoting scriptures for his own ends? The Devil survives. Is survival, then, the first thing? Is there not something else? Honor first, then victory, but if a man is to learn, first he must live. You would be wise to go to Co'rdoba or to Toledo. The best of things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever."

"You have saved my life. Wait. Perhaps I have only made you aware of death. We do not yet know what the night may bring. -Mathurin"

"How many are the lives we meet and pass! -Mathurin"

"If I do not travel late I may not travel at all. -Mathurin"

"A lion is not to be slain by jackals."

"Much of command is the ability to take command."

"I have only a sword, but a strong man need wish for no more than this: a sword in the hand, a horse between his knees, and the woman he loves at the battle's end. ~Mathurin Kerbouchard"

"Any time is a time for thinking of women, and when they thrust the blade that takes my life I shall be thinking of women, or of a woman. If not, then death has come too late."

"I have been nothing, but there is tomorrow."

"A ship does not sail with yesterday's wind."

"Instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other."

"As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking."

"Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking."

"The hostess is our modern Sibyl. She is a witch who lays her guests under a spell. In this house they think themselves happy; in that witty; in a third profound. It is all an illusion (which is nothing against it, for illusions are the most valuable and necessary of all things, and she who can create one is among the world's greatest benefactors), but as it is notorious that illusions are shattered by conflict with reality, so no real happiness, no real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails."

"On both sides of her sat men and women of the highest distinction. Every man, it was said, had been a Prime Minister and every woman, it was whispered, had been the mistress of a king. Certain it is that all were brilliant, and all were famous. Orlando took her seat with a deep reverence in silence. … After three hours, she curtseyed profoundly and left. But what, the reader may ask with some exasperation, happened in between. In three hours, such a company must have said the wittiest, the profoundest, the most interesting things in the world. So it would seem indeed. But the fact appears to be that they said nothing. It is a curious characteristic which they share with all the most brilliant societies that the world has seen. Old Madame du Deffand and her friends talked for fifty years without stopping. And of it all, what remains? Perhaps three witty sayings."

"Society is the most powerful conception in the world and society has no existence whatsoever."

"Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it — the poets and novelists — can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does no exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma — a mirage."

"Something, perhaps, we must believe in, and as Orlando, we have said, had no belief in the usual divinities she bestowed her credulity upon great men — yet with a distinction. Admirals, soldiers, statesmen, moved her not at all. But the very thought of a great writer stirred her to such a pitch of belief that she almost believed him to be invisible. Her instinct was a sound one. One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see."

"The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property; (2) that she was a woman which amounts to much the same thing …"

"No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal party and Labour party — for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not the love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of truth and exaltation of virtue — But these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditch water."