R. Scott Bakker Quotes

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.

What is practicality but one moment betrayed for the next? -

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?

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.

It seemed poison had been poured into wonder's own decanter.

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.

I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world - something I could have fun destroying.

Love is like sleep. One can never seize, never force love.

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?

Love is lust made meaningful. Hope is hunger made human.

I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor ... ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury.

There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.

Helplessness. If women were hope´s oldest companions, it was due to helplessness. Certainly women often exerciced dreadful power over a single hearth, but the world between hearths belonged to men.

The world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish.

The world is a big place and our brain is only three pounds.

Saying 'I could have done more,' Zin, is what marks a man as a man and not a God.

If we're nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us.

Conviction, no matter how narcotic its depth, simply did not make true.

Like life, games were governed by rules. But unlike life, games were utterly defined by those rules. The rules were the game, and if one played by different rules, then one simply played a different game. Since a fixed framework of rules determined the meaning of every move as a move, games possessed a clarity that made life seen like a drunken brawl by comparison. The proprieties were indubitable, the permutations secure; only the outcome was shrouded.

He said ... " A pause. He cleared his throat. "He said that pity was the only love I could hope for."
He saw her swallow, blink. "Oh, Akka ... "
Of all the world, only she truly understood. Of all the world.

Here we find further argument for Gotagga's supposition that the world is round. How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?

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.

A cut scarred where a caress faded away.

To indulge it is to breed it. To punish it is to feed it. Madness knows no bridle but the knife. - SCYLVENDI

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.

There was such a difference, he thought, between the beauty that illuminated, and the beauty that was illuminated.

And that revelation murdered all that I once did know. Where once I asked of the God, 'Who are you?' now I ask, 'Who am I?

That hope is little more than the premonition of regret. This is the first lesson of history.

We must speak plainly. Only honesty provides truth. Only truth delivers triumph.

Do not mistake me, Inrithi. In this much Conphas is right. You are all staggering drunks to me. Boys who would play at war when you should kennel with your mothers. 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 not daring. It is not a trial of souls, nor 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.
You have offered me war, and I have accepted. Nothing more. I will not regret your losses. I will not bow my head before your funeral pyres. I will not rejoice at your triumphs. But I have taken the wager. I will suffer with you. I will put Fanim to the sword, and drive their wives and children to the slaughter. And when I sleep, I will dream of their lamentations and be glad of heart.

A strange coldness had settled upon Achamian, the monolithic selfishness of which only children and madmen are sometimes capable.

The arguments were assembled and were defeated. The reasons railed and railed. But love had no logic.
No more than sleep.

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.

Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something flat, like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman's eyes.

It's the concert of knowledge and ignorance that underwrites our decisions.

For Nautzera there was no present, only the clamour of a harrowing past and the threat of a corresponding future. For Nautzera, the present had receded to a point, had become the precarious fulcrum whereby history leveraged destiny. A mere formality.

Esmenet had loved joking about cocks. She marvelled at the way men fussed over them, cursing, congratulating, beseeching, coaxing, commanding, even threatening them. Once she told Achamian about a deranged priest who had actually held a knife to his member, hissing „You must listen!" After that, she said, she understood that men, far more than women, were other to themselves.

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.

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.

Misogyny is simply a symptom of how stupid and self-serving we all are. As is racism. As is any outlook that lumps people into pejorative categories (like 'neckbeards'), that urges or insinuates hatred of people based on simplistic identifications.

A lifetime of cannibal hatred

Dreams drawn from the sheath.

Fot he sin of the idolater is not that he worships stone, but that he worships one stone over others.

Where hard life makes some maudlin to the point of weeping at mere memory, it grants others a curious immunity to suffering. Like the slaves who work the charcoal pits, their skin grows hardened to the pinch of fire and coals, insensible to burning things.

He no longer heard Kellhus speak so much as observed him cut and carve, whittle and hew, as though the man had somehow shattered the glass of language and fashioned knives from the pieces.

What did it mean to a prophet to sing in a God´s own voice? Would that make him a shaman, as in the days described in the Tusk? Or would it make him a god?

He struck his own fire, listened to the night wind roar through the trees. Sometimes, when he could see it, he stared at the Conriyan encampment and counted fires like an idiot child. „Always number your foemen," his father had once told him, „by the glitter of their fires." Sometimes he gazed at the stars and wondered if they too were his enemies.

He knew that one never stood still, even while waiting. That sometimes the sheathed knife could cut the most throats of all.

Sleep, when deep enough, is indistinguishable from vigilance.

Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.

Most men would rather die in deception than live in uncertainty.

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?

The world is a circle that possesses as many centres as it does men.

No intellect is orphaned, despite all the foundling hearts. All sons are born stranded because all fathers are sons. Every child is told, even those suckled on the teats of wolves.

To resent is to brood in inaction, to pass through life acting in a manner indistinguishable from those who bear no grudges. But hatred hails from a wilder, far more violent tribe. Even when you cannot strike out, you strike nonetheless. Inward, if not outward, as if such things have direction. To hate, especially without recourse to vengeance, is to besiege yourself, to starve yourself to the point of eating your own, then to lay wreaths of blame at the feet of the accused.

I am Cnaiur urs Skiötha, breaker-of-horses-and-men!",
"I am Cnaiür urs Skiötha, most violent of all men!
I bear your fathers and brothers upon my arms!

While waiting for the hidden machinery of messengers and secretaries to relay his request, Achamian wandered into an adjoining courtyard, struck by the other immensities that framed his present circumstance. Even if there were no Consult, no threat of the Second Apocalypse, he realized, nothing would be the same. Kellhus would change the world, not in the way of an Ajencis or a Triamis, but in the way of an Inri Sejenus.
This, Achamian realized, was Year One. A new age of Men.

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.

Sheltered by his caste, Sarcellus had not, as the impoverished must, made fear the pivot of his passions. As a result he possessed an immovable self-assurance. He felt. He acted. He judged. The fear of being wrong that so characterized Achamian simply did not exist for Cutias Sarcellus. Where Achamian was ignorant of the answers, Sarcellus was ignorant of the questions. No certitude, she thought, could be greater.

Let us be moved, you and I, by the things themselves. Let us discover each other.

You've learned the lesson,' Kellhus had said on one of those rare mornings when he shared her breakfast.
'What lesson might that be?'
'That the lessons never end.' He laughed, gingerly sipped his steaming tea. 'That ignorance is infinite.

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.

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.

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.

All men are greater than dead men.

Fools can be trusted precisely because they are fools. Their agendas rarely intersect with your own.

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.

Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.

He looked like a bored boy deciding whether to poke a dead fish.

Of course he could see only blackness, such was the treachery of fire, which iluminated small circles by darkening the entire world.

Ignorance was ever the iron of certainty, for it was as blind to itself as sleep. It was the absence of questions that made answers absolute - not knowledge! To

And he now knew with certainty that the world was hollowed of its wonder by knowledge and travel, that when one stripped away the mysteries, its dimensions collapsed rather than bloomed. Of course, the world was a much more sophisticated place to him now than it had been when he was a child, but it was also far simpler. Everywhere
men grasped and grasped, as though the titles "king," "shriah," and "grandmaster" were simply masks worn by the same hungry animal. Avarice, it seemed to him, was the world's only dimension.

Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.

And 'barbarity,' I fear, is simply a word for unfamiliarity that threatens.

Sorweel: „Then how can we hope to resist him?"
Harweel: „With our swords and our shields. And when those fail us, with spit and curses."
But the spit and the curses, Sorweel would learn, always came first, accompanied by bold gestures and grand demonstrations. War was an extension of argument, and swords were simply words honed to a blood-letting edge. Only the Sranc began with blood. For Men, it was always the conclusion.

Kings never lie. They demand the world be mistaken. - CONRIYAN PROVERB When

Sit with a merchant or sit with a beggar, and it'll always be the beggar who buys your first drink.

No soul moves alone through the world, Leweth. Our every thought stems from the thoughts of others. Our every word is but a repetition of world spoken before. Every time we listen, we allow the movements of another should to carry our own ... NO one's soul moves alone, Leweth. When one love dies, on must learn to love another.

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.

The vulgar think the God by analogy to man and so worship Him in the form of the Gods. The learned think the God by analogy to principles and so worship Him in the form of Love or Truth. But the wises think the God not at all. They know that thought, which is finite, can only do violence to the God, who is infinite. It is enough, they say, that the God thinks them.

Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.

Consequences lost all purchase when they became mad. And desperation, when pressed beyond anguish, became narcotic.

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.

He had despised the sorcerer, thinking him one of those mewling souls who forever groaned beneath burdens of their own manufacture.

One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.

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.

Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.