Iain Pears Quotes

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are aban...

Do you know, the only people I can have a conversation with are the Jews? At least when they quote scripture at you they are not merely repeating something some priest has babbled in their ear. They h...

Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because...

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from...

I have brought peace to this land, and security, he began.And what of your soul, when you use the cleverness of argument to cloak such acts? Do you think that the peace of a thousand cancels out the u...

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies -- the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not...

When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of...

The point of civilization is to be civilized; the purpose of action is to perpetuate society, for only in society can philosophy truly take place.

Philosophy cannot be extinguished, though men will try ... The spirit seeks the light, that is its nature. It wishes to return to its origin, and must forever try to reach enlightenment.

This is a perfectly good picture. And if I didn't know you, I would be impressed and charmed. But I do know you.He thought some more, wondering whether he dared say precisely what he felt, for he knew...

Politics bores you? Bronsen said.Julien smiled. It does. Apologies, sir, and it is not that I haven't tried to be fascinated. But careful and meticulous research has suggested the hypothesis that all...

Manlius ... took care in his invitations, actively sought to exclude from his circle crude and vulgar men like Caius Valerius. But they were all around; it was Manlius who lived in a dream world, and...

He who profits by villainy, has perpetrated it.

Do you wish to speak in Provençal, French, or Latin? They are all I can manage, I'm afraid.Any will do, the rabbi replied in Provençal.Splendid. Latin it is, said Pope Clement.

Olivier took a deep breath, then turned and bowed in farewell. Gersonides nodded in return, then thought of something.The manuscript you brought me, by that bishop. It argues that understanding is mor...

A hundred francs! Oh, dear me! It is worth millions of francs, my child. But my -- dealer -- here tells me that in fact a picture is worth only what someone will give for it. How much money do you hav...

His idleness was his refuge, and in this he was like many others in [occupied] France in that period; laziness became political.

Felix had gone to live in a lotus land of his imagination. Where what is desired is dreamed of as already happened, where obstacles dissolve under the weight of desire, and where reality has vanished...

[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because t...

[H]e initially conceived of Olivier as a man of the greatest promise destroyed by a fatal flaw, the unreasoning passion for a woman dissolving into violence, desperately weakening everything he tried...