The Warrior Prophet Quotes

“Love is lust made meaningful. Hope is hunger made human.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“There was such a difference, he thought, between the beauty that illuminated, and the beauty that was illuminated.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Men, Kellhus had once told her, were like coins: they had two sides. Where one side of them saw, the other side of them was seen, and though all men were both at once, men could only truly know the side of themselves that saw and the side of others that was seen—they could only truly know the inner half of themselves and the outer half of others.
At first Esmenet thought this foolish. Was not the inner half the whole, what was only imperfectly apprehended by others? But Kellhus bid her to think of everything she’d witnessed in others. How many unwitting mistakes? How many flaws of character? Conceits couched in passing remarks. Fears posed as judgements …
The shortcomings of men—their limits—were written in the eyes of those who watched them. And this was why everyone seemed so desperate to secure the good opinion of others—why everyone played the mummer. They knew without knowing that what they saw of themselves was only half of who they were. And they were desperate to be whole.
The measure of wisdom, Kellhus had said, was found in the distance between these two selves.
Only afterward had she thought of Kellhus in these terms. With a kind of surpriseless shock, she realized that not once—not once!—had she glimpsed shortcomings in his words or actions. And this, she understood, was why he seemed limitless, like the ground, which extended from the small circle about her feet to the great circle about the sky. He had become her horizon.
For Kellhus, there was no distance between seeing and being seen. He alone was whole. And what was more, he somehow stood from without and saw from within. He made whole …”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“For all things there is a toll. We pay in breaths, and our purse is soon empty.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Most men would rather die in deception than live in uncertainty.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Consequences lost all purchase when they became mad. And desperation, when pressed beyond anguish, became narcotic.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“To piss across water is to piss across your reflection”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“all men are frauds. Some, the wise, fool only others. Others, the foolish, fool only themselves. And a rare few fool both others and themselves—they are the rulers of Men”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Doubt, he would say, set men free … Doubt, not truth! Beliefs were the foundation of actions. Those who believed without doubting, he would say, acted without thinking. And those who acted without thinking were enslaved.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“And ‘barbarity,’ I fear, is simply a word for unfamiliarity that threatens.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Mystery made thing gigantic. Knowledge made small.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“The vulgar think the God by analogy to man and so worship Him in the form of the Gods. The learned think the God by analogy to principles and so worship Him in the form of Love or Truth. But the wises think the God not at all. They know that thought, which is finite, can only do violence to the God, who is infinite. It is enough, they say, that the God thinks them.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“When one believed, one´s soul moved. When one didn´t, everything else moved.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“No decision is so fine as to not bind us to its consequences. No consequence is so unexpected as to absolve us of our decisions. Not even death.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Of course he could see only blackness, such was the treachery of fire, which iluminated small circles by darkening the entire world.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“He struck his own fire, listened to the night wind roar through the trees. Sometimes, when he could see it, he stared at the Conriyan encampment and counted fires like an idiot child. „Always number your foemen,“ his father had once told him, „by the glitter of their fires.“ Sometimes he gazed at the stars and wondered if they too were his enemies.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Masses of warring men animated the horizon, crashing into stubborn ranks, churning in melee. The air didn’t so much thunder as hiss with the sound of distant battle, like a sea heard through a conch shell, Martemus thought—an angry sea. Winded, he watched the first of Conphas’s assassins stride up behind Prince Kellhus, raise his short-sword …
There was an impossible moment—a sharp intake of breath.
The Prophet simply turned and caught the descending blade between his thumb and forefinger. “No,” he said, then swept around, knocking the man to the turf with an unbelievable kick. Somehow the assassin’s sword found its way into his left hand. Still crouched, the Prophet drove it down through the assassin’s throat, nailing him to the turf.
A mere heartbeat had passed.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Almost all men prized the familiar path over the true.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Intelligent people, Achamian had found, were typically less happy. The reason for this was simple: they were better able to rationalize their delusions. The ability to stomach Truth had little to do with intelligence—nothing, in fact. The intellect was far better at arguing away truths than at finding them.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet: The Prince of Nothing, Book Two (The Prince of Nothing)

“... fot he sin of the idolater is not that he worships stone, but that he worships one stone over others.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Fate was but one more world-born subterfuge, another lie men used to give meaning to their abject helplessness.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet: The Prince of Nothing, Book Two (The Prince of Nothing)

“He no longer heard Kellhus speak so much as observed him cut and carve, whittle and hew, as though the man had somehow shattered the glass of language and fashioned knives from the pieces.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“And Cnaiür grinned as only a Chieftain of the Utemot could grin. The neck of the world, it seemed, lay pressed against the point of his sword. I shall butcher. All hungered here. All starved.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“We,” she repeated, laughing as though both hurt and astounded. “It really is ‘we’ now, isn’t it?” With a shy, even scared, smile, she helped him pull free his weathered robes. “When I can’t find you,” he said, “or even when you turn away, I feel … I feel hollow, as though my heart’s a thing of smoke … Isn’t that ‘we’?”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Helplessness. If women were hope´s oldest companions, it was due to helplessness. Certainly women often exerciced dreadful power over a single hearth, but the world between hearths belonged to men.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Whore. How many men had embraced her? How many gritty chins against her cheek? Always something to be endured. All of them punishing her for their need. Monotony had made them seem laughable, a long queue of the weak, the hopeful, the ashamed, the angered, the dangerous. How easily one grunting body replaced the next, until they became abstract things, moments of a ludicrous ceremony, spilling bowel-hot libations upon her, smearing her with their meaningless paint. One no different from the next.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“A może, w co chętniej wierzył Achamian, wybrańcami byli ci, którzy się wahali. Często myślał o tym, że wabik fałszywej pewności jest najbardziej narkotyczną i destrukcyjną ze wszystkich pokus. Kto czynił dobro, tkwiąc w niepewności, czynił dobro bez obietnicy nagrody... Może więc samo zwątpienie było kluczem?
To pytanie – co zrozumiałe – musiało pozostać nierozstrzygnięte. Jeżeli szczere zwątpienie rzeczywiście miało być warunkiem odkupienia, mogli go dostąpić tylko ludzie nieznający odpowiedzi.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“To open a book was not only to seize a moment of helplessness, not only to relinquish a jealous handful of heartbeats to the unpredictable mark of another man’s quill, it was to allow oneself to be written. For what was a book if not a long consecutive surrender to the movements of another’s soul?”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“Nigdy nie uważał, że „czyta” książki. Język był w tym wypadku równie zdradziecki, jak u hazardzisty, który przechwala się wygraną partią, tak jakby siłą lub determinacją wydarł losowi zwycięstwo, gdy tymczasem szczęśliwy rzut sztonami nie był niczym więcej, jak tylko udaną próbą wykorzystania chwili własnej bezradności. Otwarcie książki zaś wiązało się z ryzykiem zupełnie innej miary. Otwierając książkę, nie tylko stawał się bezradny, nie tylko oddawał ileś tam zazdrośnie strzeżonych uderzeń serca władającemu piórem obcemu człowiekowi, lecz pozwalał samego siebie napisać. Czymże jest bowiem lektura księgi, jeśli nie ciągłym poddawaniem się nieprzewidywalnym kaprysom duszy jej autora?”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet

“The most powerful flatteries dwelt not in what was said but in the assumptions behind what was said.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Warrior Prophet