Arms and the Man Quotes

On the balcony a young lady, intensely conscious of the romantic beauty of the night, and of the fact that her own youth and beauty are part of it, is gazing at the snowy Balkans.

I am so happy—so proud! It proves all our ideas were real after all.

The world is really a glorious world for women who can see its glory and men who can act its romance!

I am a Swiss, fighting merely as a professional soldier. I joined Servia because it came first on the road from Switzerland.

There are only two sorts of soldiers: old ones and young ones.

Oh you are a very poor soldier—a chocolate cream soldier! Come, cheer up.

She is so grand that she never dreams that any servant could dare to be disrespectful to her; but if she once suspects that you are defying her, out you go.

You have the soul of a servant, Nicola.
Yes: that’s the secret of success in service.

Sergius Saranoff…is a tall, romantically handsome man…the result is precisely what the advent of the nineteenth century thought first produced in England: to wit, Byronism…it is clear that here is Raina’s ideal hero

Dearest, all my deeds have been yours. You inspired me. I have gone through the war like a knight in a tournament with his lady looking down on him!

I think we two have found the higher love. When I think of you, I feel that I could never do a base deed, or think an ignoble thought.

Which of the six of me is the real man? That’s the question that torments me. One of them is a hero, another a buffoon, another a humbug, another perhaps a bit of a blackguard. And one, at least, is a coward—jealous, like all cowards.

I want to be quite perfect with Sergius—no meanness, no smallness, no deceit. My relation to him is the one really beautiful and noble part of my life.

Do you know, you are the first man I ever met who did not take me seriously?
You mean, don’t you, that I am the first man that has ever taken you quite seriously?

How easy it is to talk! Men never seem to me to grow up: they all have schoolboy’s ideas. You don’t know what true courage is…I would marry the man I loved, which no other queen in Europe has the courage to do...You dare not: you would marry a rich man’s daughter because you would be afraid of what other people would say of you.

I could no more fight with you than I could make love to an ugly woman. You’ve no magnetism: you’re not a man, you’re a machine.

The world is not such an innocent place as we used to think.

My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I am a free citizen.