RSR. Scott Bakker

23 collected words

R. Scott Bakker

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

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 / quote

02Undated

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 / quote

03Undated

So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.

R. Scott Bakker / quote

04Undated

Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.

R. Scott Bakker / quote

05Undated

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 / quote

06Undated

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 / quote

07Undated

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 / quote

08Undated

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 / quote

09Undated

There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence.

R. Scott Bakker / quote

10Undated

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 / quote

11Undated

Saying 'I could have done more,' Zin, is what marks a man as a man and not a God.

R. Scott Bakker / quote

12Undated

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 / quote

13Undated

The Men of the Ordeal do not march to save the World, Proyas--at least not first and foremost. They march to save their wives and children. Their tribes and their nations. If they learn that the world, their world, slips into ruin behind them, that their wives and daughters may perish for want of their shields, their swords, the Host of Hosts would melt about the edges, then collapse.

R. Scott Bakker / quote

14Undated

There was such a difference, he thought, between the beauty that illuminated, and the beauty that was illuminated.

R. Scott Bakker / quote

15Undated

Consequences lost all purchase when they became mad. And desperation, when pressed beyond anguish, became narcotic.

R. Scott Bakker / quote

16Undated

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 / quote

17Undated

Hoga Gothyelk no longer felt anger, not truly -- only varieties of sorrow.

R. Scott Bakker / quote

18Undated

The world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish.

R. Scott Bakker / quote

19Undated

Darkness shields as much as it threatens.

R. Scott Bakker / quote

20Undated

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 / quote

21Undated

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

R. Scott Bakker / quote

22Undated

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 / quote

23Undated

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 / quote