Quotes from R. Scott Bakker

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Darkness shields as much as it threatens.

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

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?

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

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

If soot stains your tunic, dye it black. This is vengeance.

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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

To piss across water is to piss across your reflection

For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and our purse is soon empty.

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