Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive, #3)

by Brandon Sanderson

The trick to happiness wasn’t in freezing every momentary pleasure and clinging to each one, but in ensuring one’s life would produce many future moments to anticipate.

What had they done with that victory? They’d set up false gods in the form of men whose eyes reminded them of the Knights Radiant. The life of men

Taravangian did not believe in any religion, for they were unwieldy things, designed to fill gaps in human understanding with nonsensical explanations, allowing people to sleep well at night, granting them a false sense of comfort and control and preventing them from stretching further for true understanding,

He felt good lots of days. Trouble was, on the bad days, that was hard to remember. At those times, for some reason, he felt like he had always been in darkness, and always would be.

.

You tried to help the people of the market. You mostly failed. This is life. The longer you live, the more you fail.

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.”

Find the balance. Accept the pain, but don’t accept that you deserved it.”

Those were the eyes of a man who bore the kinds of wounds you couldn’t fix with bandages.

Life going well? The darkness would whisper that he was only setting himself up for a bigger fall.

“How nice would it be, if I could simply shove it all away? Storms.” He tried to imagine it. Not spending his life worrying about the mistakes he’d made. Not hearing the constant whispers that he wasn’t good enough, or that he’d failed his men.

“Sometimes, a hypocrite is nothing more than a man who is in the process of changing.”

“ ‘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.’ ”

You should draw me, the sword said. “And do what, sword-nimi?” Szeth whispered. Fight him. I think he might be evil.

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.

Life breaks us, Teft. Then we fill the cracks with something stronger.”