Quotes from R. Scott Bakker

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.

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.

Despite all the pain, all the wrenching loss, there is no greater glory than a complicated life.

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.

And Cnaiür grinned as only a Chieftain of the Utemot could grin. The neck of the world, it seemed, lay pressed against the point of his sword. I shall butcher. All hungered here. All starved.

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.

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

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.

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

Power does not make safe. History murders the children of weak rulers.

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.

Every woman knows there are only two kinds of men: those who feel and those who pretend. Always remember, my dear, though only the former can be loved, only the latter can be trusted. It is passion that blackens eyes, not calculation.

Almost all men prized the familiar path over the true.

You can only believe so many lies before becoming one of them.

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.

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 beating hearts. Some events are not remembered—they are relived.

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

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

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

If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.

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

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?

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!

Where power was perceived, power was given. For his entire life Conphas had been surrounded by tutors.