Wind and Truth (The Stormlight Archive, #5)

by Brandon Sanderson

A common failing among men who wished to appear strong. It was not weakness to relax. By being so afraid of it, they gave simple things power over them.

Healing is not an event, Pattern, but a process.

“If it weren’t for that capacity, then what good would choices be? If we never had the power to do terrible things, then what heroism would it be to resist?”

“The wrong people get far too much mileage out of things that sound nice,” Wit said. “Take it from a guy who is all too capable with a lie: nothing is easier to sell someone than the story they want to hear.

“A virtue is something that is valuable even if it gives you nothing. A virtue persists without payment or compensation. Positive thinking is great. Vital. Useful. But it has to remain so even if it gets you nothing. Belief, truth, honor … if these exist only to get you something, you’ve missed the storming point.”

If hope doesn’t mean anything to you when you lose, then it wasn’t ever a virtue in the first place. It took me a long time to learn that, and I finally did so from the writings of a man who lost every belief he thought he had, then started over new.” “Sounds like someone wise,” Syl said. “Oh, Sazed is among the best. Hope I get to meet him someday.”

“You know what first drew me to you, Kaladin?” Wit asked. “You did one of the most difficult things a man can do: you gave yourself a second chance.”

“it is this: just because something is fleeting, do not imagine it to be unimportant.” He hesitated, then continued. “And likewise, just because something is eternal, do not assume it to be … to be relevant…”

Who berates a person for bettering herself? Who sells books and stationery, yet feels the need to undercut someone overcoming enormous physical limitations to use them?”

I can’t help thinking our individual neuroses would feed off one another in dangerous ways. My sadness fueling her feelings of abandonment when I retreat. Her self-destruction triggering my panic at being unable to help…”

if I could enshrine one law in all further legal codes, it would be this. Let people leave if they wish.

Normal doesn’t exist. So if we slavishly try to dress ourselves to imitate it, all we’re really doing is becoming a different kind of abnormal—a miserable kind.”

Curious, how people’s decisions are an individual matter when they’re confronted about them—but those decisions form blatant patterns.”

“I might not be here,” Adolin said, “if someone hadn’t stood up for me when it wasn’t their fight. I’m here for you and this city. I promise it.”

Kid, have you got issues. So maybe take it from someone else with issues. It’s fine to need help. I needed it from you. Still might.

“Ideals are dead things,” Kaladin said, “unless they have people behind them. Laws exist not for themselves, but for those they serve.”

art was locked to the page, and a person was always so much more than any image could contain.

“When you’re living an illusion, spren-nimi, be very careful not to do anything to spoil it. Because once you do, it is exceedingly difficult to recapture your audience.”

Some people whispered of supernatural skill on his part, that he was too capable for a boy of fourteen. That angered him. It made luck out of sweat. He hated it when they pretended he was something special. He wasn’t. That was the point.

It was the eternal irony of the capable rhetorician: train to find holes in any philosophy, and that will inevitably extend to your own.

An inquisitive mind did not stop asking questions just because it found answers.

Renarin was … growing to respect who he was rather than who he thought he should be.

The people of Shinovar shouldn’t feel bad because the storms aren’t strong here, he told himself. Everyone’s challenges are different.

you learn to respect the thing the greatest predator fears.

“Because I want to be right only when I’m right, not because it’s expected.

I worry that in our zeal, we forget that merely because something is more standard or conventional, that doesn’t make it bad.

It was the wrong way of things, but sometimes the wrong way could … sound better.

If you are told no, you just punch harder—because life has taught you that’s how to get what you want. But sometimes, deny it though you may, the world doesn’t need what you want.

“If you blame yourself for your squires dying, then you’ll have to blame Kal for when Maps died, or Teft, or any other losses. Can’t have it both ways.”

It was a fallacy: the idea that you could never know anything because there was always something to learn.

Stories. Specifically, the one she’d told herself: the performance that she was happy and strong and not terrified. A lie that made it possible to shine when all the world was dark.

These boys didn’t remember the old kingdom, but their parents did—and their thoughts had a way of seeping into the children, like ink through too-thin paper.

“At its core, science is about control. Being able to repeat the same experiment, get the same results, then use those results to your advantage.”

More and more, she was trying to let the points of light—not the darkness between them—guide her.

“The thing is, the deepest truths always sound a little trite. Because we all know them, and feel foolish being reminded.”

“My elders were shockingly keen on things like slavery,” Kaladin said. “I don’t revere anything or anyone just because of age.”

A lot of laws and rules were the same—retaining their positions by merit of momentum, not virtue. If true nobility wasn’t of blood, but of the heart, as Dalinar said … then good traditions would be valuable because of what they offered, not because they merely existed.

Emotions still made a mess of her, but a budding knowledge—reinforced by experience—emerged like a powerful light from within. She could do this. She had already done it.

To anyone else, being two women at once might have been demanding and confusing. For Shallan it was just everyday life. Only two people at the same time? How easy.

In math, you can know a thing, yes, but it is the proof that teaches the deeper truth. Life is your proof, Shallan.”

he could not be broken by the truth. Truth was the weapon once used to bloody him, pulled from his own flesh afterward, and now held up as his finest blade.

“Understanding has never led to hatred. Show me. I cannot take your pain, but I can help you carry it.”