R. Scott Bakker > Quotes

“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, The Darkness That Comes Before

“Doubt begets understanding, and understanding begets compassion. Verily, it is conviction that kills.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Thousandfold Thought

“Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

“I rememeber asking a wise man, once . . . 'Why do Men fear the dark?' . . . 'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.' '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, The Judging Eye

“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, The Darkness That Comes Before

“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.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

“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.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Love is lust made meaningful. Hope is hunger made human.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

“Do not mistake me, Inrithi. In this much Conphas is right. You are all staggering drunks to me. Boys who would play at war when you should kennel with your mothers. You know nothing of war. War is dark. Black as pitch. It is not a God. It does not laugh or weep. It rewards neither skill not daring. It is not a trial of souls, nor the measure of wills. Even less is it a tool, a means to some womanish end. It is merely the place where the iron bones of the earth meet the hollow bones of men and break them.

You have offered me war, and I have accepted. Nothing more. I will not regret your losses. I will not bow my head before your funeral pyres. I will not rejoice at your triumphs. But I have taken the wager. I will suffer with you. I will put Fanim to the sword, and drive their wives and children to the slaughter. And when I sleep, I will dream of their lamentations and be glad of heart.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

“Darkness shields as much as it threatens.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“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, The Darkness That Comes Before

“The world has long ceased to be the author of your anguish.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

“There was such a difference, he thought, between the beauty that illuminated, and the beauty that was illuminated.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“If soot stains your tunic, dye it black. This is vengeance.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Thousandfold Thought

“Saying 'I could have done more,' Zin, is what marks a man as a man and not a God.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

“Achamian tossed his hands skyward in dismay. “Foolish boy! How many faiths are there? How many competing beliefs? And you would murder another on the slender hope that yours is somehow the only one?”
― R. Scott Bakker

“Beliefs are the foundation of actions. Those who believed without doubting, he would say, acted without thinking. And those who acted without thinking were enslaved.”
― R. Scott Bakker

“Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

“Water everywhere, falling in thundering cataracts, singular drops, and draping sheets. Kellhus paused next to one of the shining braziers, peered beneath the bronze visage that loomed orange and scowling over his father, watched him lean back into absolute shadow.
“You came to the world,” unseen lips said, “and you saw that Men were like children.”
Lines of radiance danced across the intervening waters.
“It is their nature to believe as their fathers believed,” the darkness continued. “To desire as they desired … Men are like wax poured into moulds: their souls are cast by their circumstances. Why are no Fanim children born to Inrithi parents? Why are no Inrithi children born to Fanim parents? Because these truths are made, cast by the particularities of circumstance. Rear an infant among Fanim and he will become Fanim. Rear him among Inrithi and he will become Inrithi …
“Split him in two, and he would murder himself.”
Without warning, the face re-emerged, water-garbled, white save the black sockets beneath his brow. The action seemed random, as though his father merely changed posture to relieve some vagrant ache, but it was not. Everything, Kellhus knew, had been premeditated. For all the changes wrought by thirty years in the Wilderness, his father remained Dûnyain …
Which meant that Kellhus stood on conditioned ground.
“But as obvious as this is,” the blurred face continued, “it escapes them. Because they cannot see what comes before them, they assume nothing comes before them. Nothing. They are numb to the hammers of circumstance, blind to their conditioning. What is branded into them, they think freely chosen.
So they thoughtlessly cleave to their intuitions, and curse those who dare question. They make ignorance their foundation. They confuse their narrow conditioning for absolute truth.”
He raised a cloth, pressed it into the pits of his eyes. When he withdrew it, two rose-coloured stains marked the pale fabric. The face slipped back into the impenetrable black.
“And yet part of them fears. For even unbelievers share the depth of their conviction. Everywhere, all about them, they see examples of their own self-deception … ‘Me!’ everyone cries. ‘I am chosen!’ How could they not fear when they so resemble children stamping their feet in the dust? So they encircle themselves with yea-sayers, and look to the horizon for confirmation, for some higher sign that they are as central to the world as they are to themselves.”
He waved his hand out, brought his palm to his bare breast. “And they pay with the coin of their devotion.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Thousandfold Thought

“Where no paths exist, a man strays only when he misses his destination. There is no crime, no transgression, no sin save foolishness or incompetence, and no obscenity save the tyranny of custom.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

“Men, Kellhus had once told her, were like coins: they had two sides. Where one side of them saw, the other side of them was seen, and though all men were both at once, men could only truly know the side of themselves that saw and the side of others that was seen—they could only truly know the inner half of themselves and the outer half of others.
At first Esmenet thought this foolish. Was not the inner half the whole, what was only imperfectly apprehended by others? But Kellhus bid her to think of everything she’d witnessed in others. How many unwitting mistakes? How many flaws of character? Conceits couched in passing remarks. Fears posed as judgements …
The shortcomings of men—their limits—were written in the eyes of those who watched them. And this was why everyone seemed so desperate to secure the good opinion of others—why everyone played the mummer. They knew without knowing that what they saw of themselves was only half of who they were. And they were desperate to be whole.
The measure of wisdom, Kellhus had said, was found in the distance between these two selves.
Only afterward had she thought of Kellhus in these terms. With a kind of surpriseless shock, she realized that not once—not once!—had she glimpsed shortcomings in his words or actions. And this, she understood, was why he seemed limitless, like the ground, which extended from the small circle about her feet to the great circle about the sky. He had become her horizon.
For Kellhus, there was no distance between seeing and being seen. He alone was whole. And what was more, he somehow stood from without and saw from within. He made whole …”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“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, The Thousandfold Thought

“The world is a circle that possesses as many centres as it does men.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before

“For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and our purse is soon empty.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Most men would rather die in deception than live in uncertainty.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“To be a student required a peculiar kind of capitulation, a willingness not simply to do as one is told, but to surrendor the movements of one's soul to the unknown complexities of another's. A willingness, not simply to be moved, but to be remade.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Consequences lost all purchase when they became mad. And desperation, when pressed beyond anguish, became narcotic.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“To piss across water is to piss across your reflection”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“If we’re nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Darkness That Comes Before