All men recited self-aggrandizing stories, words of ascendancy and exception, to balm the inevitable indignities of fact. An emperor need only repeat those stories to command the hearts of men.
More than anything, it was ignorance that delivered conviction beyond the pale of disputation. Ignorance of questions. Ignorance of alternatives. No tyranny was so complete as blindness.
He knew that one never stood still, even while waiting. That sometimes the sheathed knife could cut the most throats of all.
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 circum...
Where power was perceived, power was given. For his entire life Conphas had been surrounded by tutors.
When one believed, one´s soul moved. When one didn´t, everything else moved.
What is practicality but one moment betrayed for the next? —
What did they know of motherhood, the mad miracle of finding your interior drawn from you, clinging and bawling and giggling and learning everything there was to learn anew?
What comes before determines what comes after, Kellhus continued. For the Dûnyain, there’s no higher principle. And just what comes before? Cnaiür asked, trying to force a sneer. For Men? History. Lan...
We must speak plainly. Only honesty provides truth. Only truth delivers triumph.
War is
To indulge it is to breed it. To punish it is to feed it. Madness knows no bridle but the knife. —SCYLVENDI
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...
The more crowded the concerns of the present, the more difficult it became to see the ways in which the past portended the future. Had
The darkness was crisp, as though scraped of sight and smell by winter’s razor.
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...
Stupid men, Conphas had found, tended to be excessively proud of their few brilliant moments.
Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence.
Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence. They are moments that rankle at becoming past, and so remain contemporaries of our beat...
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 o...