An Instance of the Fingerpost

by Iain Pears

he knew nothing of the law and believed it to have something to do with justice. As I had once done myself, until I studied it.

Simple selfishness causes less harm than desperate virtue.

They live in a world where, if you do not perpetually rise, then you inevitably fall. Fame and fortune are of the most evanescent quality; I have, and can lose, neither.

All that he considered truly noble, the pursuit of knowledge through experiment, he abandoned in search of worldly gain. I alone, I think, understood the sorrow of this, that what the world considered success was, in Lower’s mind, waste and a failure.