Top 95 R. Scott Bakker Quotes
#1. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#2. It's the concert of knowledge and ignorance that underwrites our decisions.
R. Scott Bakker
#3. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#4. 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 deceit.
R. Scott Bakker
#5. Some say men continually war against circumstances, but I say they perpetually flee. What are the works of men if not a momentary respite, a hiding place soon to be discovered by catastrophe? Life is endless flight before the hunter we call the world. - EKYANNUS VIII, 111 APHORISMS Spring,
R. Scott Bakker
#6. What if the choice isn't between certainties, between this faith and that, but between faith and doubt? Between renouncing the mystery and embracing it?
R. Scott Bakker
#7. Given the manifest frailty of men, given the long succession of delusions that was their history, what could be more preposterous than claiming oneself the least deluded, let alone privy to the absolute?
R. Scott Bakker
#8. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#9. Conviction, no matter how narcotic its depth, simply did not make true.
R. Scott Bakker
#10. Sleep, when deep enough, is indistinguishable from vigilance.
R. Scott Bakker
#12. He knew that one never stood still, even while waiting. That sometimes the sheathed knife could cut the most throats of all.
R. Scott Bakker
#13. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#14. 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
R. Scott Bakker
#15. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#16. 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?
R. Scott Bakker
#17. Sit with a merchant or sit with a beggar, and it'll always be the beggar who buys your first drink.
R. Scott Bakker
#18. He had despised the sorcerer, thinking him one of those mewling souls who forever groaned beneath burdens of their own manufacture.
R. Scott Bakker
#19. What is practicality but one moment betrayed for the next? -
R. Scott Bakker
#20. The world is a circle that possesses as many centres as it does men.
R. Scott Bakker
#21. The world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish.
R. Scott Bakker
#22. And 'barbarity,' I fear, is simply a word for unfamiliarity that threatens.
R. Scott Bakker
#23. If soot stains your tunic, dye it black. This is vengeance.
R. Scott Bakker
#24. 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?
R. Scott Bakker
#25. Love is lust made meaningful. Hope is hunger made human.
R. Scott Bakker
#26. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#27. To indulge it is to breed it. To punish it is to feed it. Madness knows no bridle but the knife. - SCYLVENDI
R. Scott Bakker
#28. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#29. You can only believe so many lies before becoming one of them.
R. Scott Bakker
#30. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#32. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#33. To piss across water is to piss across your reflection
R. Scott Bakker
#34. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#35. Here we find further argument for Gotagga's supposition that the world is round. How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?
R. Scott Bakker
#36. Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.
R. Scott Bakker
#37. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#38. I wanted a literate, socially intricate, and cosmopolitan world - something I could have fun destroying.
R. Scott Bakker
#39. No decision is so fine as to not bind us to its consequences. No consequence is so unexpected as to absolve us of our decisions. Not even death.
R. Scott Bakker
#40. Convince a man to take a single step - after all, what earthly difference could one step make? - and he would walk the next mile to prove himself right.
R. Scott Bakker
#41. Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.
R. Scott Bakker
#42. Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.
R. Scott Bakker
#43. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#44. One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.
R. Scott Bakker
#46. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#47. He looked like a bored boy deciding whether to poke a dead fish.
R. Scott Bakker
#48. 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?
R. Scott Bakker
#49. Kings never lie. They demand the world be mistaken. - CONRIYAN PROVERB When
R. Scott Bakker
#50. That hope is little more than the premonition of regret. This is the first lesson of history.
R. Scott Bakker
#51. When a man possesses the innocence of a child, we call him a fool.
When a child possesses the cunning of a man, we call him an abomination. As with love, knowledge has its seasons.
R. Scott Bakker
#52. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#53. Of course he could see only blackness, such was the treachery of fire, which iluminated small circles by darkening the entire world.
R. Scott Bakker
#54. It seemed poison had been poured into wonder's own decanter.
R. Scott Bakker
#55. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#56. Let us be moved, you and I, by the things themselves. Let us discover each other.
R. Scott Bakker
#57. We must speak plainly. Only honesty provides truth. Only truth delivers triumph.
R. Scott Bakker
#58. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#59. Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.
R. Scott Bakker
#61. The world is a big place and our brain is only three pounds.
R. Scott Bakker
#63. Like a stern father, war shames men into hating their childhood games.
R. Scott Bakker
#64. The arguments were assembled and were defeated. The reasons railed and railed. But love had no logic.
No more than sleep.
R. Scott Bakker
#65. Sometimes the Nonman would climb upon some wild pulpit, the mossed remains of a fallen tree, the humped back of a boulder, and paint wonders with his dark voice. Wonders and horrors both.
R. Scott Bakker
#66. Most men would rather die in deception than live in uncertainty.
R. Scott Bakker
#67. Hoga Gothyelk no longer felt anger, not truly
only varieties of sorrow.
R. Scott Bakker
#69. Desperation glares in all Men, but it burns as a beacon when it takes a King for tinder. A
R. Scott Bakker
#70. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#71. 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?
R. Scott Bakker
#73. Saying 'I could have done more,' Zin, is what marks a man as a man and not a God.
R. Scott Bakker
#74. 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?
R. Scott Bakker
#75. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#76. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#77. Old women are more reconciled to death than old men. By bringing life to the world, we come to see ourselves as debtors. What's given is taken.
R. Scott Bakker
#79. One might sooner wash shit from shit than cleanse a soul so wicked!
R. Scott Bakker
#80. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#81. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#82. There was such a difference, he thought, between the beauty that illuminated, and the beauty that was illuminated.
R. Scott Bakker
#83. All men are frauds. Some, the wise, fool only others. Others, the foolish, fool only themselves. And a rare few fool both others and themselves - they are the rulers of Men
R. Scott Bakker
#84. Fot he sin of the idolater is not that he worships stone, but that he worships one stone over others.
R. Scott Bakker
#85. A strange coldness had settled upon Achamian, the monolithic selfishness of which only children and madmen are sometimes capable.
R. Scott Bakker
#86. Complexity begets ambiguity, which yields in all ways to prejudice and avarice. Complication does not so much defeat Men as arm them with fancy.
R. Scott Bakker
#87. Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence.
R. Scott Bakker
#88. Suffer not a whore to live, for she maketh a pit of her womb.
R. Scott Bakker
#89. There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.
R. Scott Bakker
#90. Love is like sleep. One can never seize, never force love.
R. Scott Bakker
#91. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
#92. This is the problem of all great revelations: their significance so often exceeds the frame of our comprehension. We understand only after, always after. Not simply when it is too late, but precisely because it is too late.
R. Scott Bakker
#93. For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and our purse is soon empty.
R. Scott Bakker
#94. Consequences lost all purchase when they became mad. And desperation, when pressed beyond anguish, became narcotic.
R. Scott Bakker
#95. 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.
R. Scott Bakker
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