Patrick O'Brian quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Patrick O'Brian

Patrick O'Brian Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Patrick O'Brian on Wise Famous Quotes.

I am so happy that you saw your epop.

I know of few men over 50 that seem to me entirely human, virtually none who has long exercised authority.

Trollops are capital things in port, but will not do at sea.

How wonderfully strange,' he thought, 'to be upset by this trifle; yet I am upset.

Wittles is up' said Killick

The newly-minted captain admits the irony between the gold on his shoulders and the lack of gold in his pockets.

It has always seemed to me that books are the supreme decorations of a room

Jack, you've debauched my sloth.

men strike out their permanent characters; or have those characters struck into them

I've come down from the mountains, with an ass-full of specimens...

For a moment Jack felt the strongest inclination to snatch up his little gilt chair and beat the white-faced man down with it ...

After all a book can be represented as a conversation with one's demon.

Sheep ain't poetical.

God,' he thought, 'never let me outlive my wits.

On a ship, everything is enclosed: the people are right on top of each other and can't get up and walk away.

Come all you thoughtless young men,
a warning take by me
And never leave your happy homes
to sail the raging sea.

No man born of woman has ever understood spoken Portuguese.

Whereas I had not meant anything so illiberal as a national reflexion, of course; only that I hated Papists.

What's wrong with (Captain) Jack Aubrey?"
"Everything, since he has a command and I have not.

It is a great while since I felt the grind of bone under my saw,' he added, smiling with anticipation.

What are bashed neeps?"
"Neeps hackit with balmagowry.

Wondering just how Mr Church thought he had deserved anything short of impalement, Stephen walked into the cabin.

I have never yet known a man admit that he was either rich or asleep.

In a day when, if you insulted a man it might cost you your life, you were probably more civil.

But when a man puts on maturity and invulnerability, it seems that he necessarily becomes indifferent to many things that gave him joy.

The sensation of falling into the past is not unlike that of coming home for the holidays.

The back of my hand to guilt.

Jack, you have debauched my sloth.

aboard ship, and then hard tack, salt-horse,

I wonder, James, whether it is not too easy for a rich man to despise money

Nelson once said that love of his country served him for a greatcoat.

We are always the most violent against those whom we have injured.

I slept as the person in Plutarch that ran from Marathon to Athens without a pause would have slept if he had not fallen dead, the creature.

Rested, shaved, coffee'd, steaked, you will be a different man.

Likings arise when one has no earthly reason for liking - the most wildly improbable marriages and uncommon friendship.

For Captain Aubrey, as for the rest of brute creation, there were only two kinds of birds, the edible and the inedible.

We understood one another better before ever I opened my mouth

That would be locking the horse after the stable door is gone, a very foolish thing to do.

The lookout that first sights the cat shall have ten guineas and remission of sins, short of mutiny, sodomy, or damaging the paintwork.

If I were a woman I should march out with a flaming torch and a sword; I should emasculate right and left.

Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas.

The Navy speaks in symbols and you may suit what meaning you choose to the words.

He was conscientious, he did his duty as he understood it; but he was no seaman.

Gluppit the prawling strangles, there!

There is a systematic flocci-nauci-nihili-pilification of all other aspects of existence that angers me.

I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.

Diana accepted the bait, spat out the hook with contempt, and hurried away to the stables to consult with Thomas,

I have often observed that extremely violent noise and activity go with good-fellowship and heightened spirits.

But it did not much care for hunting, and then like so many geldings it spent much of its time mourning for its lost stones: a discontented horse.

The author says that when an angry impulse is not immediately expressed, it turns to melancholy.

poachers and Methodies, of course. Oh,

Killick was a cross-grained bastard, who supposed that if he sprinkled his discourse with a good many sirs, the words in between did not signify:

There is so much ignorant prejudice against bees in a dining-room.

I am opposed to authority, that egg of misery and oppression; I am opposed to it largely for what it does to those who exercise it.

Stephen had spared no expense in making himself more unhappy, his own position as a rejected lover clearer.

Compulsion is the death of friendship.

Yet whether wisdom can be any more profitably pursued than happiness is a question.

Invincible ignorance could not be enlightened; and

He that would make a pun would pick a pocket.

Most men find [peace] entirely unlike what they had expected - like love...

Any innocent pleasure is a real good: there are not so many of them.

Surely man in general is born to be oppressed or solitary, if he is to be fully human;

Wallis,' said Maturin, 'I am happy to see you. How is your penis?

The function of the novel is the exploration of the human condition. Really, that's what it's all about.

A virtuous esculent!

The more a victory cost, the more it was esteemed.

Clap on with both hands, sir - never say die - one more heave and we're home, safe and dry.

It is unjust to provoke a man and then to complain he is a satyr if the provocation succeeds. You

Other people's marriages are a perpetual source of amazement.

Do you not find it happens very often, that you are as gay as Garrick at dinner and then by supper-time you wonder why God made the world?

There never was a ship that fought well without she was a happy ship.

Sometimes you receive a knock in action: it may be your death-wound or just a scratch

It all gave a pleasant illusion of eternity, this quiet sailing under a perfect sky towards a horizon perpetually five miles ahead, never nearer.

Better than a shove in the eye with a dry stick. [- Jack]

Puddings, my dear sir?' cried Graham.
Puddings. We trice 'em athwart the starboard gumbrils, when sailing by and large.

I sew his ears on from time to time, sure.

It must be a weary life, being in a permanent state of rage or at least at half-cock.

For very strangely his officers looked upon Jack Aubrey as a moral figure, in spite of all proofs of the contrary ...

How much better a man feels when he is mixed with halibut and leg of mutton and roebuck

He held up two fingers, in case a landman might not fully comprehend so great a number.

Should I feel better if I were to vomit?' asked Jagiello. 'I doubt it,' said Stephen. 'It has done nothing for the Colonel.

The newly-minted captain is told to let nothing stop him but to do nothing that would risk his ship or his crew.

I very much dislike being interviewed by the kind of journalist who tries to dig into your private life.

I have 60 years of reading to draw upon: naval memoirs, dispatches, the Naval Chronicles, family letters.

You can't be happy if you're not tolerably happy with yourself. The addition of friends adds immeasurably to life.

Lord Nelson's maxim 'Never mind manoeuvres: always go straight at 'em.

Never mind manoeuvres, always go at them.

Virtue should always be colmingled with humor.

Take a newspaper account of Waterloo or Trafalgar, with all the small advertisements: it seems much more real than reading about it in a history book.

Jack and Stephen were neither of them human until the first pot of coffee was down, hot and strong.

What was independence but a word? What did any form of government matter? Freedom: to do what?

One lives in the very present moment; lives intently. There is no urge to be doing: being is the highest good.

Still, the farther hills remained as untouched as the sea; high, remote, arid, dark and sterile, poisoned with the sun.

Jack had never been a hypocrite until he became a father, and even now it did not come easy.

Although wealth may not bring happiness, the immediate prospect of it provides a wonderfully close imitation.

Let us drink to the renewed success of Irish arms, and confusion to the Pope.

I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.

You do not mean there is danger of peace?, cried Jack.

She is remarkably dry,' he said to Stephen who, preferring to die in the open, had crept up on deck,

was an officer holding out his sword,