Jonathan Harris > Quotes

“The Love you have for what you're doing is actually the most important thing. Love is the only thing that's going to pull you through and get you to finish... but there is also a paradoxical and interesting fact: The thing you actually end up making is going to be such a failure compared to the original feeling that you had, the original vision that you had. If you finish and you find out that it's not a failure, it means that you didn't try hard enough, because when you really fall in love with something, you idealize it, and you develop a vision of it that's actually unattainable in reality. The feeling is so pure that you can't make a real thing that has that feeling and so you're inevitably going to be disappointed by it. And in some way, the depth of that disappointment is in direct correlation to how beautiful the vision was to begin with.”
― Jonathan Harris

“First, Christianity brought to Byzantium a conception of rulership that combined political and religious leadership under one head of state, and this encouraged political stability. Second, it was a rulership that invited its subjects to give their assent to each new ruler and offered them a surprisingly direct relationship with him. Third, it provided public services that catered for the most basic needs of its citizens and promoted a spiritual ethos that captured their hearts and minds. Lastly, it developed a new form of art and architecture that sought to express the immaterial and spiritual in visual form.”
― Jonathan Harris, The Lost World of Byzantium

“Consequently, as the fourth century progressed, the imperial office came to be seen as somehow holy. Chronicles of the time referred to ‘the sacred emperor’, and in his portraits he was depicted with a halo. It was a prime example of the blurring of any distinction between secular and religious that came to characterise Byzantium.”
― Jonathan Harris, The Lost World of Byzantium

“One of the perennial trends of human history is that people are constantly on the move, whether fleeing oppression or ecological disaster, seeking a better life or in some cases aiming to conquer and plunder.”
― Jonathan Harris, The Lost World of Byzantium