The Outcasts of Time Quotes

“There's so much beauty in the world, don't close your eyes to it just because you've lost your own small patch of happiness.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“The man who has no knowledge of the past has no wisdom.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“In this new century, people are all divided and unsatisfied, hoping that God will smile on them personally.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“How then should we regard the past? Indeed, why should we study it at all but to prove to our fellow men that we can, and for the skill of disputation? The answer lies not in preferring the blurred, grand vision to the scrupulous detail, nor does it lie in the opposite prejudice: neither contains sufficient truth. Instead, we must find our own way, in the sure knowledge that we too will enter that underworld, where the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity, and not as the passing shapes that we may glimpse every day in a looking glass, which then are gone forever.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity, and not as the passing shapes that we may glimpse every day in a looking glass, which then are gone forever.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“The last day I was here, in eighteen forty-three, was the only time since the plague when we were not at war.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“There are times in life when the cycle of the ages and the destruction of one generation’s work by the next is an uplifting thing, for it promises the young so much. And there are times, later in life, when you realise that it means that your work too will be swept away. Honestly, the only way to secure everlasting fame is to produce such a fine work that no age will ever rival it.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“There’s so much beauty in the world, don’t close your eyes to it just because you’ve lost your own small patch of happiness.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“But I do know this: no loss is absolute. There is always something left to live for.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“If they had to die, what a grand way to go.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“For two thousand years we’ve been telling people what tortures are done to you in Hell and never once have we explained exactly what is so attractive about Heaven.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“…fairness is to society what water is to a duck’s back. Society does not change because of fairness: it changes because it sees an advantage. And it won’t change if most people do not see an advantage.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“Being allowed to do something does not make you the equal of all the others that do the same thing.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“If people of your generation object so strongly to the principle that men might give other men pleasure, then I am hardly surprised that you have done nothing to object to the principle that they may cause women pain.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“The air is still and sacred - like the inside of an hourglass after the sand has run out.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“… but I’ve seen all Christian life laid out, as on a table at a feast - and I’ve dipped my fingers into the sauces and I’ve tasted the soul of mankind in its many forms, and at the end of the day, I’ve got to say, it has left a bitter taste in my mouth.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“We’d be nothing if we did not carry the past with us. We’d be ignorant of good and evil, of changing circumstances and unchanging virtues.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“You must balance the law as you know it with the law that applied then…”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“Life in our time would have been unbearable without you.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“Yesterday I spoke of us being brothers until the end of time, blithely assuming that time was our empire. But we were already dying.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“You want to scream so much that you’ll empty your bones of time.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“Home is not a place but a time.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time