Oathbringer

“When has any tyrant ever said to himself, ‘This is enough’?”

Sometimes, a hypocrite is nothing more than a man who is in the process of changing.

“Funny, isn’t it, how so many of our stories start the same way, but have opposing endings? In half, the child ignores her parents, wanders out into the woods, and gets eaten. In the other half she discovers great wonders. There aren’t many stories about the kids who say, ‘Yes, I shall not go into the forest. I’m glad my parents explained that is where the monsters live.’”

“‘The question,’ she replied, ‘is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what' you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and "how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.’”

That was the coward’s route. Wishing for ignorance.

You could not arrive at excellence by the average of these people. Excellence was an individual quest, not a group effort.

Some problems could not be fixed with a lie.

“Be wary,” Shallan whispered, “of anyone who claims to be able to see the future.”

The best indication of what human beings will do is not what they think, but what the record says similar groups have done in the past.

Order was the very substance of rule. If things were organized, control could be asserted.

All life worked in concert, he’d been taught in his youth. Everything but men, who refused their place. Who destroyed instead of added.

It becomes the responsibility of every man, upon realizing he lacks the truth to seek it out.

The most important step a man can take. It’s not the first one, is it?

It’s the next one.

Being a human was about making sense of chaos, finding meaning among the random elements of the world.

“I…don’t feel like I’ve won.…”

“Welcome to war, Evi,” Dalinar said, heading toward the door. “There are no unequivocal wins. Just victories that leave fewer of your friends dead than others.”

She felt like drawing this scene, but knew it was the type of moment she couldn’t capture on a page. It wasn’t about content or composition, but the pleasure of living.

The trick to happiness wasn’t in freezing every momentary pleasure and clinging to each one, but in ensuring one’s life would produce many future moments to anticipate.

“You make it sound like having the power to change the world is a bad thing.”

“Bad? No. Abhorrent, depressing, ghastly. Having power is a terrible burden, the worst thing imaginable, except for every other alternative.”

Most cities lived on the very edge of civilization. Everyone talked about towns and villages out in the middle of nowhere as if they were uncivilized, but she’d found people in those places pleasant, even-tempered, and comfortable with their quieter way of life.

Not in cities. Cities balanced on the edge of sustainability, always one step from starvation. When you pressed so may people together, their cultures, ideas, and stenches rubbed off on one another. The results wasn’t civilization. It was contained chaos, pressurized, bottled up so it couldn’t escape.

“You can’t civilize war,” Dalinar said. “There’s no painting it up and making it pretty.”

“Morality is an axis that doesn’t interest us,” Mraize said calmly. “Only loyalty and power are relevant, for morality is as ephemeral as the changing weather. It depends upon the angle from which you view it.”

His sincerity was so unexpected. Dalinar had been around Alethi politicians so much that he found honesty an obscure thing, like a language he no longer spoke.

These are the men…well, these are the men who actually change the world. And they terrify me. For men never see as far as they think they do.

“Don’t deflect your evils by pointing out the faults of others,” Shallan said.

You are a man with complicated beliefs, who does not accept everything you are told. You decide how you are defined. Don’t surrender that to them. They will gleefully take the chance to define you, if you allow it.

He needed more than vague explanations and abstract ideas—but those were the very soul of art. If you could explain something perfectly, then you’d never need art. That was the difference between a table and a beautiful woodcutting. You could explain the table: its purpose, its shape, its nature. The woodcutting you simply had to experience.

Oh, Adolin, Shallan thought. He’d arrived at a theory he liked, and now wouldn’t let it go. It was a common mistake warned of in her scientific books.

“Falsehoods serve nobody, Kadash,” Dalinar said, pulling back. “If the Almighty is dead, then pretending otherwise is pure stupidity. We need real hope, not faith in lies.”

She didn’t exactly understand what she was doing, but she rarely did. Art wasn’t about understanding, but about knowing.

In my painful experience, the truth may be simple, but it is rarely easy.

But you should try to understand what they want out of life, and respect that, rather than projecting onto them what you think they should want out of life.

An army was the sort of thing everyone wanted to have, so long as it was off doing important things elsewhere.

I’d hoped…I’d hoped you could tell me, give me an absolute right. For once, I’d like my moral code not to come with a list of exceptions at the end.

“They all stretched farther and farther until they collapsed. In all the history of mankind, has any conqueror decided they had enough? Has any man just said, ‘This is good. This is what I wanted,’ and gone home?”

Morality is not a thing you can simply doff to put on the helm of battle, then put back on when you’re done with the slaughter.

“Power is a knife,” Wit said, taking his seat. “A terrible, dangerous knife that can’t be wielded without cutting yourself. We joked about stupidity, but in reality most people aren’t stupid. Many are simply frustrated at how little control they have over their lives. They lash out. Sometimes in spectacular ways…”

They were too theatrical—and there were too many of them—for all to be truly deranged. This was a fad. A way of dealing with unexpected events and giving some shape to lives that had been turned upside down.

That didn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. A group of people all trying to impress one another was always more dangerous than the lone psychopath.

Politics is involved, Adolin—so by definition it can’t be easy.

But merely being tradition does not make some thing worthy, Kadash. We can’t just assume that because some thing is old it is right.

Curious, how quickly tyrants grow religious. It must that be convenient to tell yourself that your murders belong to the Almighty instead.