Brandon Sanderson

I name you idiot for playing with powers you only presume to understand.

And storm Teft if it wasn’t a valid question. One not enough soldiers asked themselves. Right here, right now, should I be fighting? Is there a better way?

And she would ask the best question of them all.

What will I discover next?

“I’m telling you to think!” his father snapped. “I’m telling you that if you want to change the world, you have to stop being part of the problem!”

In her little room of a laboratory, everything fit together. She’d met scholars who claimed they needed chaos to function. Perhaps that was true for some, but in her experience, good science wasn’t about sloppy inspiration. It was about meticulous incrementalization.

A thousand wrong plans were no more useful that a single wrong one.

“The way you talk lacks hope.”

“‘Hope,’” she said, spreading her papers out on the table. “Have I ever told you how much I dislike that word? Think of what it means, what it implies. You have hope when you’re outnumbered. You have hope when you lack options. Hope is always irrational, Uncle.”

Any information—even if you suspect your enemy is feeding it to you—is useful, son. More wars are lost to lack of information than are lost to lack of courage.

If there is one thing I can guarantee you about humankind, Last Listener, is is this: Provide them with a sword , and they will find a way to impale themselves upon it.”

True freedom—with the power to make certain she didn’t ever have to be dependent upon anyone else, listener or spren. True freedom couldn’t exist while someone else had power over you.

Who did she think was listening? Was she only praying because she was afraid?

Yes, she thought, continuing to paint. I’m afraid. And I have to hope that someone, somewhere, is listening. That someone has a plan. That it all matters somehow.

Jasnah took comfort in the idea that there was no plan, that everything was random. She said that a chaotic universe meant the only actions of actual importance were the ones they decided were important. That gave people autonomy.

Mathematics thought that there were numbers associated with tones—frequencies, wavelengths. Music, at its most fundamental level, was math.