“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.”

“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.”

“…in joy he will invariably dance; when he is in love he will dance, for the czardas helps him to explain to the girl he loves exactly what he feels for her. And she understands. One czardas will reveal to a Hungarian village maid the state of her lover’s heart far more clearly than do all the whisperings behind hedges in more civilized lands.”

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

“When will you give up these mad adventures, and leave others to fight their own battles and to save their own lives as best they may?'When your ladyship has ceased to be the most admired woman in Europe, namely, when I am in my grave.”

“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.”

“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.”