The Once and Future King (The Once and Future King, #1-4)

by T.H. White

Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”

But what creature could be so low as to go about in bands, to murder others of its own blood?”

“Well, anyway,” he said, “suppose they did not let you stand against all the evil in the world?” “I could ask,” said the Wart. “You could ask,” repeated Merlyn. He thrust the end of his beard into his mouth, stared tragically at the fire, and began to munch it fiercely.

True warfare is rarer in Nature than cannibalism.

They would get nothing but the unmarketable conscience of having done what they ought to do in spite of fear—something which wicked people have often debased by calling it glory with too much sentiment, but which is glory all the same.

It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.

Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury.

Generosity is the eighth deadly sin.

It was as if everything would lead to sorrow, so long as man refused to forget the past. The wrongs of Uther and of Cain were wrongs which could have been righted only by the blessing of forgetting them.