“Fools can be trusted precisely because they are fools. Their agendas rarely intersect with your own.”
Source: The Darkness That Comes Before
“So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.”
Source: The Judging Eye
“Men, Kellhus had once told her, were like coins: they had two sides. Where one side of them saw, the other side of them was seen, and though all men were both at once, men could only truly know the side of themselves that saw and the side of others that was seen—they could only truly know the inner half of themselves and the outer half of others.
At first Esmenet thought this foolish. Was not the inner half the whole, what was only imperfectly apprehended by others? But Kellhus bid her to think of everything she’d witnessed in others. How many unwitting mistakes? How many flaws of character? Conceits couched in passing remarks. Fears posed as judgements …
The shortcomings of men—their limits—were written in the eyes of those who watched them. And this was why everyone seemed so desperate to secure the good opinion of others—why everyone played the mummer. They knew without knowing that what they saw of themselves was only half of who they were. And they were desperate to be whole.
The measure of wisdom, Kellhus had said, was found in the distance between these two selves.
Only afterward had she thought of Kellhus in these terms. With a kind of surpriseless shock, she realized that not once—not once!—had she glimpsed shortcomings in his words or actions. And this, she understood, was why he seemed limitless, like the ground, which extended from the small circle about her feet to the great circle about the sky. He had become her horizon.
For Kellhus, there was no distance between seeing and being seen. He alone was whole. And what was more, he somehow stood from without and saw from within. He made whole …”
Source: The Warrior Prophet
“We belittle what we cannot bear. We make figments out of fundamentals, all in the name of preserving our own peculiar fancies. The best way to secure one's own deception is to accuse others of deceit.”
Source: The White Luck Warrior
“It is strange the way trauma deadens curiosity. To suffer cruelty in excess is to be delivered from care. The human heart sets aside its questions when the future is too capricious. This is the irony of tribulation.
To know the world will never be so bad.”
Source: The White Luck Warrior
“Zsoronga, Sorweel was beginning to realize, possessed the enviable ability to yoke his conviction to his need — to believe, absolutely, whatever his heart required. For Sorweel, belief and want always seemed like ropes too short to bind together, forcing him to play the knot as a result.”
Source: The White Luck Warrior
“Water everywhere, falling in thundering cataracts, singular drops, and draping sheets. Kellhus paused next to one of the shining braziers, peered beneath the bronze visage that loomed orange and scowling over his father, watched him lean back into absolute shadow.
“You came to the world,” unseen lips said, “and you saw that Men were like children.”
Lines of radiance danced across the intervening waters.
“It is their nature to believe as their fathers believed,” the darkness continued. “To desire as they desired … Men are like wax poured into moulds: their souls are cast by their circumstances. Why are no Fanim children born to Inrithi parents? Why are no Inrithi children born to Fanim parents? Because these truths are made, cast by the particularities of circumstance. Rear an infant among Fanim and he will become Fanim. Rear him among Inrithi and he will become Inrithi …
“Split him in two, and he would murder himself.”
Without warning, the face re-emerged, water-garbled, white save the black sockets beneath his brow. The action seemed random, as though his father merely changed posture to relieve some vagrant ache, but it was not. Everything, Kellhus knew, had been premeditated. For all the changes wrought by thirty years in the Wilderness, his father remained Dûnyain …
Which meant that Kellhus stood on conditioned ground.
“But as obvious as this is,” the blurred face continued, “it escapes them. Because they cannot see what comes before them, they assume nothing comes before them. Nothing. They are numb to the hammers of circumstance, blind to their conditioning. What is branded into them, they think freely chosen.
So they thoughtlessly cleave to their intuitions, and curse those who dare question. They make ignorance their foundation. They confuse their narrow conditioning for absolute truth.”
He raised a cloth, pressed it into the pits of his eyes. When he withdrew it, two rose-coloured stains marked the pale fabric. The face slipped back into the impenetrable black.
“And yet part of them fears. For even unbelievers share the depth of their conviction. Everywhere, all about them, they see examples of their own self-deception … ‘Me!’ everyone cries. ‘I am chosen!’ How could they not fear when they so resemble children stamping their feet in the dust? So they encircle themselves with yea-sayers, and look to the horizon for confirmation, for some higher sign that they are as central to the world as they are to themselves.”
He waved his hand out, brought his palm to his bare breast. “And they pay with the coin of their devotion.”
Source: The Thousandfold Thought
“I rememeber asking a wise man, once . . . 'Why do Men fear the dark?' . . . 'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.' 'And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things--all things!--but only so long as it remains invisible.”
Source: The Judging Eye
“The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas--at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world, their world, slips into ruin behind them, that their wives and daughters may perish for want of their shields, their swords, the Host of Hosts would melt about the edges, then collapse.”
Source: The White Luck Warrior
“You can count the bruises on your heart easily enough, but numbering sins is a far tricker matter. Men are eternally forgetting for their benefit. They leave it to the World to remeber, and to the Outside to call them to harsh accout. One hundred Heavens . . . for one thousand Hells.”
Source: The White Luck Warrior
“If the world is a game whose rules are written by the God, and sorcerers are those who cheat and cheat, then who has written the rules of sorcery?”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
“I tell you, guilt dwells nowhere but in the eyes of the accuser. This men know even as they deny it, which is why they so often make murder their absolution. The truth of crime lies not with the victim but with the witness.”
Source: The Thousandfold Thought: The Prince of Nothing, Book Three (The Prince of Nothing)
“To indulge it is to breed it. To punish it is to feed it. Madness knows no bridle but the knife.”
Source: The Thousandfold Thought: The Prince of Nothing, Book Three (The Prince of Nothing)
“The world is only as deep as we can see. This is why fools think themselves profound. This is why terror is the passion of revelation.”
Source: The Judging Eye: One (The Aspect-Emperor Trilogy)
“The bondage we are born into is the bondage we cannot see. Verily, freedom is little more than the ignorance of tyranny. Live long enough, and you will see: Men resent not the whip so much as the hand that wields it.”
Source: The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two
“The world is a big place and our brain is only three pounds.”
“I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world - something I could have fun destroying.”
“Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
“Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.”
Source: The Thousandfold Thought: The Prince of Nothing, Book Three (The Prince of Nothing)
“The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before?”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
“There was such a difference, he thought, between the beauty that illuminated, and the beauty that was illuminated.”
Source: The Warrior Prophet: The Prince of Nothing, Book Two (The Prince of Nothing)
“Consequences lost all purchase when they became mad. And desperation, when pressed beyond anguish, became narcotic.”
Source: The Warrior Prophet: The Prince of Nothing, Book Two (The Prince of Nothing)
“This is the problem of all great revelations: their significance so often exceeds the frame of our comprehension. We understand only after, always after. Not simply when it is too late, but precisely because it is too late.”
Source: The Darkness That Comes Before: Book 1 of the Prince of Nothing
“Beliefs are the foundation of actions. Those who believed without doubting, he would say, acted without thinking. And those who acted without thinking were enslaved.”
“Achamian tossed his hands skyward in dismay. “Foolish boy! How many faiths are there? How many competing beliefs? And you would murder another on the slender hope that yours is somehow the only one?”
“Love is lust made meaningful. Hope is hunger made human.”
Source: The Warrior Prophet: The Prince of Nothing, Book Two (The Prince of Nothing)
“I remeber asking a wise man, once . . . 'Why do Men fear the dark?' . . . 'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visable.' 'And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things--all things!--but only so long as it remains invisible.”
“Darkness shields as much as it threatens.”
Source: The Judging Eye: One (The Aspect-Emperor Trilogy)
“A beggar's mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king's mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity.”
Source: The Judging Eye: One (The Aspect-Emperor Trilogy)
“If soot stains your tunic, dye it black. This is vengeance.”
Source: The Thousandfold Thought: The Prince of Nothing, Book Three (The Prince of Nothing)
“Saying 'I could have done more,' Zin, is what marks a man as a man and not a God.”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
“Here we find further argument for Gotagga’s supposition that the world is round. How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?”
Source: The Thousandfold Thought: The Prince of Nothing, Book Three (The Prince of Nothing)
“There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence.”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
“History. Language. Passion. Custom. All these things determine what men say, think, and do. These are the hidden puppet-strings from which all men hang.”
Source: The Darkness That Comes Before: Book 1 of the Prince of Nothing
“Where no paths exist, a man strays only when he misses his destination. There is no crime, no transgression, no sin save foolishness or incompetence, and no obscenity save the tyranny of custom.”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
“What if the choice isn’t between certainties, between this faith and that, but between faith and doubt? Between renouncing the mystery and embracing it?”
“To be a student required a peculiar kind of capitulation, a willingness not simply to do as one is told, but to surrendor the movements of one's soul to the unknown complexities of another's. A willingness, not simply to be moved, but to be remade.”
Source: The Judging Eye: One (The Aspect-Emperor Trilogy)
“To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
“Any fool can see the limits of seeing, but not even the wisest know the limits of knowing. Thus is ignorance rendered invisible, and are all Men made fools.”
Source: The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two
“Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
“The world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish.”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
“You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill nor daring. It is not a trial of souls, not the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them.”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
“Sometimes the Nonman would climb upon some wild pulpit, the mossed remains of a fallen tree, the humped back of a boulder, and paint wonders with his dark voice. Wonders and horrors both.”
Source: The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two
“Exhaustion has a way of parting the veils between men, not so much because the effort of censoring their words exceeds them, but because weariness is the foe of volatility. Oft times insults that would pierce the wakeful simply thud against the sleepless and fatigued.”
Source: The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two
“Everyone thinks they've won the Magical Belief Lottery. Everyone thinks they more or less have a handle on things, that they, as opposed to the billions who disagree with them, have somehow lucked into the one true belief system.”
Source: Neuropath
“He had despised the sorcerer, thinking him one of those mewling souls who forever groaned beneath burdens of their own manufacture.”
Source: The Thousandfold Thought: The Prince of Nothing, Book Three (The Prince of Nothing)
“Something ... made him feel small, not in the way of orphans or beggars or children, but in a good way. In the way of souls.”
Source: The Thousandfold Thought: The Prince of Nothing, Book Three (The Prince of Nothing)
“Gods are but greater demons, the Cishaurim said, hungers across the surface of eternity, wanting only to taste the clarity of our souls. Can you not see this?”
Source: The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two
“Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.”
Source: The White-Luck Warrior: Book Two
“It is only after that we understand what has come before, then we understand nothing. Thus we shall define the soul as follows: that which precedes everything.”
Source: The Darkness that Comes Before: The Prince of Nothing, Book One (The Prince of Nothing)
