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There are no foolish oaths. All are the mark of men and true spren over beasts and subspren. The mark of intelligence, free will, and choice.
“How can you ask that, Dalinar?” “Because it should be asked,” Dalinar said. “You claim the Almighty is God. Why?” “Because he simply is.” “That isn’t good enough for me,” Dalinar said, realizing for the first time it was true. “Not anymore.”
I've only recently realized that I am of a similar opinion. Accepting something is true just because you are told to believe it does not make you believe it yourself.
“I have come to understand,” Pattern said, growing excited. “Humans … humans don’t care about the dead. You build chairs and doors out of corpses! You eat corpses! You make clothing from the skins of corpses. Corpses are things to you.”
Certainly one way to look at it
“Why is there a wall?”
Why indeed? This relates to a story of a community just accepting their fate without looking up and wondering why it is so. It teaches that it might be worth to not just live like a sheep, but aim for more than living by the whims of fate.
“Why not let them all go?” Dalinar said. “If you can’t prove who is guilty—if you can’t be sure—I think you should let them go.”
Better let ten guilty men walk free, than one innocent suffer.
“But sometimes a hypocrite is nothing more than a person who is in the process of changing.”
This hit me like a punch. Being called a hypocrite need not be taken as an insult if you believe you were wrong before.
Sometimes a world of rational explanations can become meaningless in the face of that all-consuming desire to get what you deserve.
Jealousy and vengeance makes the world burn.
“Or maybe if there are answers, I should be the one who wants to find them.”
What was that small spren that had crept out from beneath Eshonai’s corpse? It looked like a small ball of white fire; it gave off little rings of light and trailed a streak behind it. Like a comet.
You are a man with complicated beliefs, who does not accept everything you are told. You decide how you are defined. Don’t surrender that to them. They will gleefully take the chance to define you, if you allow it.
But he’d upset the balance. Rocked the boat.
Seems like this upsets any establishment ruling class. Even those who rule from shadows
“If you’d wanted a life without burdens, you shouldn’t have said the oaths,”
With great power comes great responsibility.
When you pressed so many people together, their cultures, ideas, and stenches rubbed off on one another. The result wasn’t civilization. It was contained chaos, pressurized, bottled up so it couldn’t escape.
People seem to forget that too many cultures shoved into a small space does not always interact well with eachother.
Every child eventually realizes that her father isn’t actually God.
Failure is the mark of a life well lived. In turn, the only way to live without failure is to be of no use to anyone. Trust me, I’ve practiced.
Another was a cityscape at dusk, with a group of low houses clustered before an enormous wall that had light glowing beyond it.
Perhaps the Girl Who Looked Up is a story from Shadesmar, not from Roshar
“But maybe you shouldn’t be looking for life to be easier because you choose to do something that is right! Personally, I think life is fair. It’s merely that often, you can’t immediately see what balances it.”
“Sometimes, a hypocrite is nothing more than a man who is in the process of changing.”
Apparently I found this quote so profound that I highlighted it twice.
“ ‘The question,’ she replied, ‘is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.’ ”
“Be wary,” Shallan whispered, “of anyone who claims to be able to see the future.”
Very important concept in this series
The most important step a man can take. It’s not the first one, is it? It’s the next one. Always the next step, Dalinar.
Always the next step
“I will take responsibility for what I have done,” Dalinar whispered. “If I must fall, I will rise each time a better man.”
“I am Unity.”
“Who isn’t? Life breaks us, Teft. Then we fill the cracks with something stronger.”
Excellence was an individual quest, not a group effort.
It becomes the responsibility of every man, upon realizing he lacks the truth, to seek it out.
The world suddenly made sense to me when I realized this.
The most important words a man can say are, “I will do better.”
Truer words have not been spoken.
But if we stop, if we accept the person we are when we fall, the journey ends. That failure becomes our destination.
