Persians

The Persians are an Iranian ethnic group who comprise over half of the population of Iran. They share a common cultural system and are native speakers of the Persian language as well as of the languages that are closely related to Persian.

Quotes

• And dear as the wet diver to the eyes
  Of his pale wife who waits and weeps on shore,
  By sandy Bahrein, in the Persian Gulf,
  Plunging all day in the blue waves, at night,
  Having made up his tale of precious pearls,
  Rejoins her in their hut upon the sands—
  So dear to the pale Persians Rustum came.
  • Matthew Arnold, from "Sohrab and Rustum", Poems (1853)

• The Persians are the most civilized of the peoples of the East, and what the French are to Europe, they are to the Orient... Their bearing and countenance is the best-composed, mild, serious, impressive, genial and welcoming as far as possible. They never fail to perform at once the appropriate gestures of politeness when meeting each other... They are the most wheedling people in the world, with the most engaging manners, the most supple spirits and a language that is gentle and flattering, and devoid of unpleasant terms but rather full of circumlocutions.
  • Jean Chardin, as quoted in in R. W. Ferrier, A Journey to Persia: Jean Chardin's Portrait of a Seventeenth-century Empire (1996), p. 111

• As regards the qualities of the Persians we are in the main dependent on Greek sources. Clearly they were not a people that we should call intellectual. They do not themselves seem to have had an inclination towards literature, medicine, or philosophical and scientific speculation. They were probably most at ease when living as country gentlemen. Despite the uncompromising black and white of their religious creed as expressed by Darius, there is no trace of fanaticism in them, and in general they would seem to have been tolerant. They liked to live in pleasant surroundings; coming from a country in which cultivation is restricted to fertile patches of watered land they may have been rather narrowly ‘oasis-minded’. Luxury appealed to them.
  • Cook, J. M. The Persian empire 1983. page 230. Also quoted in The Shape of Ancient Thought by Thomas McEvilley

• If scholarship hung suspended in the highest parts of heaven, the Persians would attain it.
  • Muhammad, quoted by Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah, as translated by Franz Rosenthal, vol. III, pp. 311-15, 271-4; Arabic: R. N. Frye (p. 91)

• The Persians, very good negotiators. Great negotiators, legendary negotiators. They're known for it. They're sitting across the table.
  • Donald Trump, speech at Liberty University, C-SPAN (18 January 2016), Online

See also

• Iran (Persia)
• Persian literature