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Simple answers to life’s questioning. That would be a magic beyond any I have ever been seeing.

Ambitious men never believe others aren’t the same.

No charm is proof against a dagger in the back.

“Never make your home in a place,” the old man had said, too lazy in the spring warmth to do more than wag a finger. “Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it—memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things.” Morgenes had grinned. “That way it will go with you wherever you journey. You’ll never lack for a home—unless you lose your head, of course...”

The wise man is not waiting for the realness of the world to prove itself to him. How can one be an authority before the experiencing of this realness? My master taught me—and to me it seems chash, meaning correct—that you must not defend against the entering of knowledge.

Simon, there are more things you don’t know than there are things that I do know. I despair of the imbalance.

We trolls say: “Make Philosophy your evening guest, but do not let her stay the night.”

“Neither War nor Violent Death,” Morgenes had written, “have anything uplifting about them, yet they are the candle to which Humanity flies again and again, as complacently as the lowly moth. He who has been upon a battlefield, and who is not blinded by popular conceptions, will confirm that on this ground Mankind seems to have created a Hell on Earth out of sheer impatience, rather than waiting for that original to which—if the priests are correct—most of us will eventually be ushered.

Perhaps he was a bumpkin; at least he was an honest bumpkin.

“There is nothing like the ocean to remind you of what is important,” she said quietly, and smiled. Cadrach’s returned smile was weak.

“Ah, by the Good Lord, that’s true,” he groaned. “I am reminded that life is sweet, that the sea is treacherous, and that I am a fool.”

Miriamele nodded solemnly, staring up at the bellying sails. “Those are good things to remember,” she said.

Nothing is without cost. There is a price to all power, and it is not always obvious.

When you stopped to think about it, he reflected, there weren’t many things in life one truly needed. To want too much was worse than greed: it was stupidity—a waste of precious time and effort.