I.M. Pei Quotes

“At the beginning, I thought the best Islamic work was in Spain - the mosque in Cordoba, the Alhambra in Granada. But as I learned more, my ideas shifted. I traveled to Egypt, and to the Middle East many times.I found the most wonderful examples of Islamic work in Cairo, it turns out. I'd visited mosques there before, but I didn't see them with the same eye as I did this time. They truly said something to me about Islamic architecture.”

“quoted Lewis Hyde, whose pamphlet on John Berryman and alcohol he had read in his early months at Granada House: “Irony has only emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy the cage.” Then he continued: This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing….[I]rony’s singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”

“You have to be brave when you are stupid”

“Prejudices are holes in people's general knowledge, filled with negative nonsense.”

“Without patience one cannot get far in life.”

“When you are apparently quite selflessly helping other people, you are actually trying to help yourself.”

“Throughout the history of mankind, there have been two kinds of people; those who write the books and those who burn them. The rest of us are only bystanders.”

“Thus like a Captive in an Isle confin'd,Man walks at large, a Pris'ner of the Mind”

“The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone in checking this mad, wicked folly of 'Women's Rights'. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself.”

“The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is to be disposed of, they starve her to death, and the queen herself will sting nothing but royalty, nothing but a rival queen.”