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...

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....

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

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...

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

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

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...

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

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...

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.

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...

Hoga Gothyelk no longer felt anger, not truly — only varieties of sorrow.

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...

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

And they pay with the coin of their devotion.

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

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

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 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?...

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...

Darkness shields as much as it threatens.

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.

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?

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.