Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive, #2)

by Brandon Sanderson

Do not let your assumptions about a culture block your ability to perceive the individual, or you will fail.”

Progress was taking nature and putting a box around it.

Using a fetching face to make men buy you something is no different from a man using muscle to force someone to do the same, she’d said. Both methods are base, and both will fail a person as they age.

Expectation wasn’t just about what people expected of you. It was about what you expected of yourself.

Love . . . love is like a classical melody.” Shallan grinned. “If you end your performance too quickly, your audience is disappointed?”

Tigzikk was considered the learned one in the group on account of his being able to cuss in three languages. Downright scholarly, that was.

Laws don’t matter; what’s right matters.

Honesty was among the divine attributes of the Almighty, after all, which everyone was supposed to seek.

Yet all spren are thought to be pieces of the Divine, even Cryptics like Pattern

Jasnah had once defined a fool as a person who ignored information because it disagreed with desired results.

“Hmm,” Navani said. “Then it’s probably true. That girl never did have the decency to be wrong an appropriate amount of the time.”

“It frightens me,” Shallan said, “because we all see the world by some kind of light personal to us, and that light changes our perception. I don’t see clearly. I want to, but I don’t know if I ever truly can.”

I will protect those who cannot protect themselves.

“If I protect . . . only the people I like, it means that I don’t care about doing what is right.” If he did that, he only cared about what was convenient for himself.

Strength before weakness.

“I will protect even those I hate,” Kaladin whispered through bloody lips. “So long as it is right.”

Expectation. That is the true soul of art. If you can give a man more than he expects, then he will laud you his entire life. If you can create an air of anticipation and feed it properly, you will succeed. “Conversely, if you gain a reputation for being too good, too skilled . . . beware. The better art will be in their heads, and if you give them an ounce less than they imagined, suddenly you have failed. Suddenly you are useless. A man will find a single coin in the mud and talk about it for days, but when his inheritance comes and is accounted one percent less than he expected, then he will declare himself cheated.