Quotes from Dan Brown

It's a Latin mnemonic invented by the Vatican in the Middle Ages to remind Christians of the Seven Deadly Sins. Saligia is an acronym for: superbia, avaritia, luxuria, invidia, gula, ira, and acedia.

Anthropological data clearly showed that cultures practicing religions historically had outlived nonreligious cultures. Fear of being judged by an omniscient deity always helps inspire benevolent behavior.

She was being buffeted by the air currents but grinned and flashed Langdon the thumbs-up sign. Langdon smiled weakly and returned the gesture, wondering if she knew it was the ancient phallic symbol for masculine virility.

But faith," Edmond declared, "by its very definition, requires placing your trust in something that is unseeable and indefinable, accepting as fact something for which there exists no empirical evidence.

enthralling and clearly incendiary, but for Langdon it raised one burning question that he was surprised nobody was asking: If the laws of physics are so powerful that they can create life…who created the laws?! The question, of course, resulted

the scientific advances made by early Middle Eastern cultures, one of them being our modern numbering system, whose advantages over Roman numerals included 'positional notation' and the invention of the number zero. Of course, Langdon always ended this lecture with a reminder that Arab culture had also given mankind the word al-kuhl—the favorite beverage of Harvard freshmen—known as alcohol.

Despite for a monumental reputation, the Mona Lisa was a mere thirty-one inches by twenty-one inches -- smaller even than the posters of her sold in the Louvre gift shop.

In Christianity, the number eight represented rebirth and re-creation. The octagon served as a visual reminder of the six days of God's creation of heaven and earth, the one day of Sabbath, and the eighth day, upon which Christians were "reborn" or "re-created" through baptism. Octagons had become a common shape for baptistries around the world.

Everything decayed, the perfectly ordered crystal eventually turned into random particles of dust.

The blind see what they want to see.

English, of course. The universal language of science- Maximilian Kohler

Sometimes to find truth, one must move mountains.

William Blake himself had written a similarly themed work titled All Religions Are One.

Darwin's theory described the survival of the fittest, but not the arrival of the fittest.

Nelle cattedrali è sempre notte.

If we all worshipped gravity, there would be no disagreements over which way it pulled.

I believe life not only obeys the laws of physics, but that life began because of those laws.

Rémy, you realize your steak au poivre is the only reason you still work for me.

Mitterrand was a bold man," Langdon replied, splitting the difference. The late French president who had commissioned the pyramid was said to have suffered from a "Pharaoh complex." Singlehandedly responsible for filling Paris with Egyptian obelisks, art, and artifacts, François Mitterrand had an affinity for Egyptian culture that was so all-consuming that the French still referred to him as the Sphinx.

And as we do, may we never forget the wisdom of Churchill, who warned us: 'The price of greatness…is responsibility.'

Sometimes the only course of action is the lesser of two evils.

it was about the power of the human spirit to endure any challenge, no matter how daunting.

Hell, no. A church is the one thing we don't have. Physics is the religion around here. Use the Lord's name in vain all you like,' he laughed, 'just don't slander any quarks or mesons.

We all benefit from a sense of contact with divinity… even if it is only imagined.