"The Emperor, the consensus seems to be, was an excessively suspicious man. Fear has many forms, but it is never so dangerous as when it is combined with power and perpetual uncertainty."

". . . even though the skin-spies were exposed relatively early in the course of the Holy War, most believed the Cishaurim rather than the Consult to be responsible. 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."

"The days and weeks before battle are a strange thing. All the contingents, the Conriyans, the Galeoth, the Nansur, the Thunyeri, the Tydonni, the Ainoni, and the Scarlet Spires, marched to the fortress of Asgilioch, to the Southron Gates and the heathen frontier. And though many bent their thoughts to Skauras, the heathen Sapatishah who would contest us, he was still woven of the same cloth as a thousand other abstract concerns. Once could still confuse war with everyday living …"

"The proposition I am the centre" need never be uttered. It is the assumption upon which all certainty and all doubt turns."

"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."

"It seems a strange thing to recall these events, like walking to find I had narrowly missed a fatal fall in the darkness. Whenever I think back, I’m filled with wonder that I still live, and with horror that I still travel by night."

"When shields become crutches, and swords become canes, some hearts are put to rout. When wives become plunder, and foes become thanes, all hope has guttered out."

"Sleep, when deep enough, is indistinguishable from vigilance."

"Every monumental work of the State is measured by cubits. Every cubit is measured by the length of the Aspect-Emperor’s arm. And the Aspect-Emperor’s arm, they say, stands beyond measure. But I say the Aspect-Emperor’s arm is measured by the length of a cubit, and that all cubits are measured by the works of the State. Not even the All stands beyond measure, for it is more than what lies within it, and “more” is a kind of measure. Even the God has His cubits."

"One can look into the future, or one can look at the future. The latter is by far the more instructive."

"Though you lose your soul, you shall win the world."

"What is practicality but one moment betrayed for the next?"

"Men are forever pointing at others, which is why I always follow the knuckle and not the nail."

"A day with no noon, A year with no fall, Love is forever new, Or love is not at all."

"Where the holy take men for fools, the mad take the world."

"Men never resemble one another so much as when asleep or dead."

"In terror, all men throw up their hands and turn aside their faces. Remember, Tratta, always preserve the face! For that is where you are."

"The Poet will yield up his stylus only when the Geometer can explain how Life can at once be a point and a line. How can all time, all creation, come to the now? Make no mistake: this moment, the instant of this very breath, is the frail thread from which all creation hangs. That men dare to be thoughtless ..."

"... for the sin of the idolator is not that he worships stone, but that he worships one stone over others."

"The vulgar think the God by analogy to man and so worship Him in the form of the Gods. The learned think the God by analogy to principles and so worship Him in the form of Love or Truth. But the wise think the God not at all. They know that thought, which is finite, can only do violence to the God, who is infinite. It is enough, they say, that the God thinks them."

"We will give over all of them, slain, to the Children of Eänna; you shall hamstring their horses and burn their chariots with fire. You shall bathe your feet in the blood of the wicked."

"For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and our purse is soon empty."

"Bring he who has spoken prophecy to the judgement of the priests, and if his prophecy is judged true, acclaim him, for he is clean, and if his prophecy is judged false, bind him to the corpse of his wife, and hang him one cubit above the earth, for he is unclean, an anathema unto the Gods."

"In pursuing yonder what they have lost, they encounter only the nothing they have. In order not to lose touch with the everyday dreariness in which, as irremediable realists, they are at home, they adapt the meaning they revel in to the meaninglessness they flee. The worthless magic is nothing other than the worthless existence it lights up."

"What is the meaning of a deluded life?"

"They strike down the weak and call it justice. They ungird their loins and call it reparation. They bark like dogs and call it reason."

"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."

"What the world merely kills, Men murder."

"Look unto other and ponder the sin and folly you find there. For their sin is your sin, and their folly is your folly. Seek ye the true reflecting pool? Look to the stranger you despites, not the friend you love."

"A soul too far wandered from the sun, walking deeper ways, into regions beneath map and nation, breathing air drawn for the dead, talking of lamentation."

"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."

"Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills"

"Some say I learned dread knowledge that night. But of this, as with so many other matters, I cannot write for fear of summary execution."

"On my knees, I offer you that which flies in me. My face to earth, I shout your glory to the heavens. In so surrendering do I conquer. In so yielding do I seize."

"Of all the Cants, none better illustrates the nature of the soul than the Cants of Compulsion. According to Zarathinius, the fact that those compelled unerringly think themselves free shows that Volition is one more thing moved in the soul, and not the mover we take it to be. While few dispute this, the absurdities that follow escape comprehension altogether"

"You are fallen from Him like sparks from the flame. A dark wind blows, and you are soon to flicker out."

"As a miller once told me, when the gears to not meet, they become as teeth. So it is with men and their machinations."

"In the skins of elk I pass over grasses. Rain falls, and I cleanse my face in the sky. I hear the Horse Prayers spoken, but my lips are far away. I slip down weed and still twig—into their palms I pool. Then I am called out and am among them. In sorrow, I rejoice. Pale endless life. This, I call my own."

"What frightens me when I travel is not that so many men possess customs and creeds so different from my own. Nay, what frightens me is that they think them as natural and as obvious as I think my own."

"One cannot assume the truth of what one declares without presuming the falsity of all incongruous declarations. Since all men assume the truth of their declarations, this presumption becomes at best ironic and at worst outrageous. Given the infinity of possible claims, who could be so vain as to think their dismal claims true? The tragedy, of course, is that we cannot but make declarations. So it seems we must speak as Gods to converse as Men."

"A return to a place never seen. Always is it thus, when we understand what we cannot speak."

"Like so many who undertake arduous journeys, I left a country of wise men and came back to a nation of fools. Ignorance, like time, brooks no return."

"There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others ."

"Ask the dead and they will tell you. All roads are not equal. Verily, even maps can sin."

"… conquered peoples live and die with the knowledge that survival does not suffer honour. They have chosen shame over the pyre, the slow flame for the quick."

"The will to conceal and the will to deceive are one and the same. Verily, a secret is naught but a deception that goes unspoken. A lie that only the Gods can hear."

"Since all men count themselves righteous, and since no righteous man raises his hand against the innocent, a man need only strike another to make him evil."

"Where two reasons may deliver truth, a thousand lead to certain delusion. The more steps you take, the more likely you will wander astray."

"Damnation follows not from the bare utterance of sorcery, for nothing is bare in this world. No act is so wicked, no abomination is so obscene, as to lie beyond the salvation of my Name."

"Souls can no more see the origins of their thought than they can see the backs of their heads or the insides of their entrails. And since souls cannot differentiate what they cannot see, there is a peculiar sense in which the soul cannot self-differentiate. So it is always, in a peculiar sense, the same time when they think, the same place where they think, and the same individual who does the thinking. Like tipping a spiral on its side until only a circle can be seen, the passage of moments always remains now, the carnival of spaces always sojourns here, and the succession of people always becomes me. The truth is, if the soul could apprehend itself the way it apprehended the world—if it could apprehend its origins—it would see that there is no now, there is no here, and there is no me. In other words, it would realize that just as there is no circle, there is no soul."