Heresy

I do not believe that any book should be denied to the man who possesses the wisdom to understand it, Bruno, but that does not mean I am confused about where truth lies.

But they argued as lawyers do, they twisted every answer I gave until it sounded like the opposite meaning, and I became so confused and afraid I found myself agreeing to statements that I knew were not true.

It is strange the way that someone who wants to find you guilty can start to make you believe in your own guilt, even when you know you are innocent. I was afraid I would condemn myself my mistake.

I am a mixture of contradictory elements. Equal parts earth and fire, melancholy and choler, I fear. But it is more that warmth and blue skies stir the blood, do you not think?

No," I said simply. "I hate no one. I want only to be left in peace to understand the mysteries of the universe in my own way.

Once again, I felt that peculiar stab of loneliness that only an exile truly knows: the sense that I did not belong and never would again.

I realised with a prickle of discomfort why he bothered me: it was not so much that I resented the hearty backslapping bonhomie of English upper-class gentlemen, for I could tolerate it well enough in Sidney on his own. It was the way Sidney fell so easily into this strutting group of young men, where I could not, and the fear that he might in some ways prefer their company to mine. Once again, I felt that peculiar stab of loneliness that only an exile truly knows: the sense that I did not belong, and never would again.

The Catholic chruch as threatened your life - do you not want revenge? Have you not sold your hatred to the Pretestant cause to work against the church that has hunted you?" "No," I said simply. "I hate no one. I want only to be left in peace to understand the mysteries of the universe in my own way." "God has already laid out for us the mysteries of the universe, or as much as He permits us to understand. You think your way is better?" "Better than these wars of dogma that have led men to burn and fillet one another across Europe for fifty years? Yes, I do." "Then what is it you believe?" I looked at him. "I believe that, in the end, even the devils will be pardoned.

Men might rise above the divisions for which so much blood has been spilled, and is still being spilled, and understand their essential unity.

I have also learned that adventure is not always something to seek for its own sake. You don’t realise the value of a home until you no longer have one,

I was not afraid to die for my beliefs, but not until I had determined which beliefs were worth dying for.

now more than ever, Christendom desperately needed a new philosophy, one that would draw us together as we passed from the shadows of religious wars into the enlightenment of our shared humanity and shared divinity.

Perhaps it is a trait of rich boys, I thought: craving adventure in a life made dull by the absence of daily cares.

Faith and politics are now one and the same,” he went on. “Perhaps it was always so, but it seems to have reached new extremes in our troubled century, do you not think? A man’s religion tells me where his political loyalties lie, far more than his place of birth or his language.