Peter Levi Quotes & Sayings

The only scholarship that has any merit, I suppose, is what is useful to other people as well as oneself. The most meritorious of all is what is useful to other scholars, sometimes for generations. — Peter Levi

Sings. Hope in every sphere of life is a privilege that attaches to action. No action, no hope. — Peter Levi

later i sat in the mosque balcony as the sun rose, watching while it unpicked the dark and misty folds of the forest and coloured the Bashgul river. We were all overcome by the fabulous richness of the landscape, the opulence of the wooden architecture, the yellow green coombes of ripening corn, the glistening trees. — Peter Levi

The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing 'strength from the depths of the universe'; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne's generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific. — Peter Levi

Whoever you are, you've got to start from where you are. If you're a sailor, and only know sailor's language, well, write in it, for God's sake. — Peter Levi