Maturin Quotes & Sayings

For mine is the old belief ... There is a soil in every leaf. — Maturin Murray Ballou

A time will come, and soon, when, from mere habit, you will echo the scream of every delirious wretch that harbors near you; then you will pause, clasp your hands on your throbbing head, and listen with horrible anxiety whether the scream proceeded from you or them. — Charles Robert Maturin

How much better a man feels when he is mixed with halibut and leg of mutton and roebuck — Patrick O'Brian

A virtuous esculent! — Patrick O'Brian

He paused, I thought, like a man who is watching the effect of the terrors he excites, not from malignity but vanity, merely to magnify his own courage in encountering them. — Charles Robert Maturin

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

There is no error more absurd, and yet more rooted in the heart of man, than the belief that his sufferings will promote his spiritual safety. — Charles Robert Maturin

He that would make a pun would pick a pocket. — Patrick O'Brian

Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion. — Charles Robert Maturin

I believe there are few whose view of life has not been affected by the stern or kindly influences of their early childhood, which threw them in upon themselves in timidity and reserve, or drew them out in genial confidence and sympathy with their fellow creatures. — Basil W. Maturin

It is actually possible to become amateurs in suffering. — Charles Robert Maturin

Alas! it is too true that our souls always contract themselves on the approach of a blessing, and seem as if their powers, exhausted in the effort to obtain it, had no longer energy to embrace the object. — Charles Robert Maturin

You may get a large amount of truth into a brief space. — Maturin Murray Ballou

The fountain of my heart dried up within me,
With nought that loved me, and with nought to love,
I stood upon the desert earth alone.
And in that deep and utter agony,
Though then, then even most unfit to die
I fell upon my knees and prayed for death. — Charles Robert Maturin

Looking angrily at the wombat: and a moment later, 'Come now, Stephen, this is coming it pretty high: your brute is eating my hat.'
'So he is, too,' said Dr. Maturin. 'But do not be perturbed, Jack; it will do him no harm, at all. His digestive processes
— Patrick O'Brian

A little after moonrise Stephen woke. Extreme hunger had brought on cramps in his midriff again and he held his breath to let them pass: Jack was still sitting there, the tiller under his knee, the sheet in his hand, as though he had never moved, as though he were as immoveable as the Rock of Gibraltar and as unaffected by hunger, thirst, fatigue, or despondency. In this light he even looked rock-like, the moon picking out the salient of his nose and jaw and turning his broad shoulders and upper man into one massive block. He had in fact lost almost as much weight as a man can lose and live, and in the day his shrunken, bearded face with deep-sunk eyes was barely recognizable; but the moon showed the man unchanged. — Patrick O'Brian

Ancient and modern languages teem with happily expressed sentiments of more or less force and beauty, sufficiently individualized and excellent to warrant their reproduction and classification. — Maturin Murray Ballou

The central fire is desire, and all the powers of our being are given us to see, to fight for, and to win the object of our desire. Quench that fire and man turns to ashes. — Basil W. Maturin

The character, therefore, will depend upon the thoughts. I am what I think. I am what I think even more than what I do, for it is the thought that interprets the action. An act in itself good may become even bad by the thought that inspired it. — Basil W. Maturin

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

I sew his ears on from time to time, sure. — Patrick O'Brian

Let those who smile at me, ask themselves whether they have been indebted most to imagination or reality for all they have enjoyed in life, if indeed they have ever enjoyed any thing. — Charles Robert Maturin

Yet,'said Maturin, pursuing his own thought, 'there is a quality in dogs, I must confess, rarely to be seen elsewhere and that is affection: I do not mean the violent possessive protective love for their owner but rather that mild, steady attachment to their friends that we see quite often in the best sort of dog. And when you consider the rarity of plain disinterested affection among our own kind, once we are adult, alas - when you consider how immensely it enhances daily life and how it enriches a man's past and future, so that he can look backward and forward with complacency - why, it is a pleasure to find it in brute creation. — Patrick O'Brian

And she hates being managed - that is not the word I want. What is it, Maturin?'
'Manipulated.'
'Exactly. She is a dutiful girl - a great sense of duty: I think it rather stupid, but there it is - but still she finds the way her mother has been arranging and pushing and managing and angling in all this perfectly odious. You two must have had hogsheads of that grocer's claret forced down your throats. Perfectly odious: and she is obstinate - strong, if you like - under that bread-and-butter way of hers. It will take a great deal to move her; much more than the excitement of a ball. — Patrick O'Brian

The next moment I was chained to my chair again,
the fires were lit, the bells rang out, the litanies were sung;
my feet were scorched to a cinder,
my muscles cracked, my blood and marrow hissed, my flesh consumed like shrinking leather,
the bones of my legs hung two black withering and moveless sticks in the ascending blaze;
it ascended, caught my hair,
I was crowned with fire,
my head was a ball of molten metal, my eyes flashed and melted in their sockets;
I opened my mouth, it drank fire,
I closed it, the fire was within, ... and we burned, and burned! I was a cinder body and soul in my dream. — Charles Robert Maturin

The soul shares not the body's test. — Charles Robert Maturin

Singular sentiment of pride, that can erect its trophies amid the grave. — Charles Robert Maturin

A malady
Preys on my heart that med'cine cannot reach. — Charles Robert Maturin

Well, nothing's a life or death struggle anymore, is it? The era of honor and sacrifice is over." I looked again at the O'Brian novels, lined up in order. "Jack Aubrey's full of human failings - so's Maturin - but they have principles, and they'd give their lives for them. Or for each other. Now it's all about money and status and celebrity. Not that people haven't always cared about those things, but it used to be considered venal, didn't it?" I shrugged. "It's like nobody bothers to grow up anymore. We just want to be kids all our lives. Collecting toys, having fun. — Beatriz Williams

My own lov'd light,
That very soft and solemn spirit worships,
That lovers love so well
strange joy is thine,
Whose influence o'er all tides of soul hath power,
Who lend'st thy light to rapture and despair;
The glow of hope and wan hue of sick fancy
Alike reflect thy rays: alike thou lightest
The path of meeting or of parting love
Alike on mingling or on breaking hearts
Thou smil'st in throned beauty! — Charles Robert Maturin

Different men view the same things in different ways. And the same men in the course of a few years alter their whole view of life. They have simply changed their companions on the road. Indeed the breaking with one set of people and the forming ties of friendship with others of a different type is often but the outward evidence and result of a hidden and inward change of the more intimate friendships of the mind. — Basil W. Maturin

Many a month of gloomy unconsciousness rolled over me, without date or notice. One thousand waves may welter over a sunk wreck, and be felt as one. — Charles Robert Maturin

Hypocrisy is said to be the homage that vice pays to virtue, - decorum is the outward expression of that homage; and if this be so, we must acknowledge that vice has latterly grown very humble indeed. — Charles Robert Maturin

We never get to love by hate, least of all by self-hatred. — Basil W. Maturin

Since the sheets were half-flown the sails instantly split at the seams, the maintopsail shaking so furiously that the masthead must have gone had not Mowett, the bosun, Bonden, Warley the captain of the maintop and three of his men gone aloft, laid out on the ice-coated yard and cut the sail away close to the reefs.
Warley was on the lee yardarm when the footrope gave way under him and he fell, plunging far clear of the side and instantly vanishing in the terrible sea. — Patrick O'Brian

Tis well to be merry and wise,
'Tis well to be honest and true;
It is best to be off with the old love,
Before you are on with the new. — Charles Robert Maturin

The back of my hand to guilt. — Patrick O'Brian

No one knows what is in him till he tries, and many would never try if they were not forced to. — Basil W. Maturin

When one fierce passion is devouring the soul, we feel more than ever the necessity of external excitement; and our dependence on the world for temporary relief increases in direct proportion to our contempt of the world and all its works. He — Charles Robert Maturin

It was an operation that Dr. Maturin had carried out at sea before, always in the fullest possible light and therefore on deck, and many of them had seen him do so.
Now they and all their mates saw him do it again: they saw Joe Plaice's scalp taken off, his skull bared, a disc of bone audibly sawn out, the handle turning solemnly; a three-shilling piece, hammered into a flattened dome by the armourer, screwed on over the hole; and the scalp replaced, neatly sewn up by the parson.
It was extremely gratifying - the Captain had been seen to go pale, and Barret Bonden too, the patient's cousin - blood running down Joe's neck regardless - brains clearly to be seen - something not to be missed for a mint of money - instructive, too - and they made the most of it. — Patrick O'Brian

But, however, I clapped a stopper over his capers.' Dr Maturin was proud of his nautical expressions: sometimes he got them right, but right or wrong he always brought them out with a slight emphasis of satisfaction, much as others might utter a particularly apt Greek or Latin quotation. 'And brought him up with a round stern,' he added. — Patrick O'Brian

O wretched is the dame, to whom the sound,
"Your lord will soon return," no phrase brings. — Charles Robert Maturin

Beauty hath no lustre save when it gleameth through the crystal web that purity's fine fingers weave for it. — Charles Robert Maturin

If I were a woman I should march out with a flaming torch and a sword; I should emasculate right and left. — Patrick O'Brian

Books of quotation are not only of importance to the reader for what they contain of matured thought, but also for what they suggest. Our brains receive the spark and become luminous, like inflammable material by the contact of flint and steel. — Maturin Murray Ballou

The limner's art may trace the absent feature,
And give the eye of distant weeping faith
To view the form of its idolatry;
But oh! the scenes 'mid which they met and parted;
The thoughts
the recollections sweet and bitter,
Th' Elysian dreams of lovers, when they loved,
Who shall restore them? — Charles Robert Maturin

Hollom was going forward along the larboard gangway: Nagel, an able seamen but one of the most sullen, bloody-minded and argumentative of the Defenders, was coming aft on the same narrow passage. They were abreast of one another; and Nagel walked straight on without the slightest acknowledgement other than a look of elaborate unconcern. — Patrick O'Brian

Wit is the unexpected copulation of ideas. — Patrick O'Brian

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude. — Charles Robert Maturin

There is here a striving,avid and worldly civilisation, of course; these huge and eager markets, to this incessant buying and selling, that make that self evident; but I had no conception of the ubiquitous sense of the holy, no notion of how another world can permeate the secular. Filth, stench, disease,"gross superstition" as our people say, extreme poverty, promiscuous universal defecation, do not affect it: nor do they affect my sense of humanity with which I am surrounded. What an agreeable city it is, where a man may walk around naked in the heat if it so please him — Patrick O'Brian

When art assumes the omnipotence of reality, when we feel we suffer as much from an illusion as from truth, our sufferings lose all dignity and all consolation. We — Charles Robert Maturin

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

Gluppit the prawling strangles, there! — Patrick O'Brian

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

A mirth which is not gaiety is often the mask which hides the convulsed and distorted features of agony
and laughter, which never yet was the expression of rapture, has often been the only intelligible language of madness and misery. Ecstasy only smiles
despair laughs. — Charles Robert Maturin

Within himself Jack had not the slightest doubt of victory, but it would never do to let this conviction take the form of even unspoken words; it must remain in the state of that inward glow which had inhabited him ever since the retaking of the Africaine, and which had now increased to fill the whole of his heart - a glow that he believed to be his most private secret, although in fact it was evident to everyone aboard from Stephen Maturin to the adenoidal third-class boy who closed the muster-book. — Patrick O'Brian

That would be locking the horse after the stable door is gone, a very foolish thing to do. — Patrick O'Brian

But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile. — Patrick O'Brian

They waste life in what are called good resolutions-partial efforts at reformation, feebly commenced, heartlessly conducted, and hopelessly concluded. — Charles Robert Maturin

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

It is better to hear the thunder than to watch the cloud. — Charles Robert Maturin