The Judging Eye Quotes

“I rememeber asking a wise man, once . . . 'Why do Men fear the dark?' . . . 'Because darkness' he told me, 'is ignorance made visible.' 'And do Men despise ignorance?' I asked. 'No,' he said, 'they prize it above all things--all things!--but only so long as it remains invisible.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“A beggar's mistake harms no one but the beggar. A king's mistake, however, harms everyone but the king. Too often, the measure of power lies not in the number who obey your will, but in the number who suffer your stupidity.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Darkness shields as much as it threatens.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“To be a student required a peculiar kind of capitulation, a willingness not simply to do as one is told, but to surrendor the movements of one's soul to the unknown complexities of another's. A willingness, not simply to be moved, but to be remade.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“So he came to realize that learning a language was perhaps the most profound thing a man could do. Not only did it require wrapping different sounds around the very movement of your soul, it involved learning things somehow already known, as though much of what he was somehow existed apart from him. A kind of enlightenment accompanied these first lessons, a deeper understanding of self.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“When a man possesses the innocence of a child, we call him a fool.
When a child possesses the cunning of a man, we call him an abomination. As with love, knowledge has its seasons.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“They so wanted it to be simple, believers. "It is what is!" they cried, sneering at the possibility of other eyes, other truths, overlooking their own outrageous presumption. "It says what it says," spoken with a conviction that was itself insincerity. They ridiculed questions, for fear it would make their ignorance plain. Then they dared call themselves "open.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Convince a man to take a single step—after all, what earthly difference could one step make?—and he would walk the next mile to prove himself right.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Despite all the pain, all the wrenching loss, there is no greater glory than a complicated life.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Sorweel: „Then how can we hope to resist him?“
Harweel: „With our swords and our shields. And when those fail us, with spit and curses.“
But the spit and the curses, Sorweel would learn, always came first, accompanied by bold gestures and grand demonstrations. War was an extension of argument, and swords were simply words honed to a blood-letting edge. Only the Sranc began with blood. For Men, it was always the conclusion.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“To resent is to brood in inaction, to pass through life acting in a manner indistinguishable from those who bear no grudges. But hatred hails from a wilder, far more violent tribe. Even when you cannot strike out, you strike nonetheless. Inward, if not outward, as if such things have direction. To hate, especially without recourse to vengeance, is to besiege yourself, to starve yourself to the point of eating your own, then to lay wreaths of blame at the feet of the accused.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“he knew that one never stood still, even while waiting. That sometimes the sheathed knife could cut the most throats of all.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“I remember … I remember asking a wise man, once … though whether it was last year or a thousand years ago I cannot tell. I asked him, ‘Why do Men fear the dark?’ I could tell he thought the question wise, though I felt no wisdom in asking it. ‘Because darkness,’ he told me, ‘is ignorance made visible.’ ‘And do Men despise ignorance?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they prize it above all things—all things!—but only so long as it remains invisible.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Power, she had come to realize, had the insidious habit of inserting others between you and your tasks, rendering your limbs little more than decorative mementoes of a more human past.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Look unto others and ponder the sin and folly you find
there. For their sin is your sin, and their folly is your folly.
Seek ye the true reflecting pool? Look to the stranger you
despise, not the friend you love.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“The air became dry and still, like the gap in a dead man’s mouth.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“How could he know these things without knowing them? And if something as profound as grammar could escape his awareness—to the point where it had simply not existed—what else was lurking in the nethers of his soul?”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Since all men count themselves righteous, and since no righteous man raises his hand against the innocent, a man need only strike another to make him evil.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Fight the inclination of your heart, conquer your weakness for pride, for spite. Do not make humiliation of truth. I know you can feel it, the promise of release, the bone-shuddering release. Turn from the shrill poison of your conceit, from the hooked fists and knuckled teeth, from the rod of cold iron that holds you rigid when you should sleep. Turn from these things and embrace the truth of the life—the life!—that I offer you.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“The vitality of his old bones had surprised him. Perhaps his spirit was what would fail … Something always failed him.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“A peculiar sound, like a sob thumbed into the shape of a cackle.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“What reservoirs of determination would it take? To spend so long immersed in a task not only bereft of any tangible profit, but without any appreciable measure of progress—how much would it require? Year after year, wrestling with the imperceptible, wringing hope out of smoke and halfmemory. What depths of conviction? What kind of perseverance? Certainly not any the sane possess.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“How strange it had been, to find his life’s revelation in the small things; he who had wrestled with dying worlds. But then the great ever turned upon the small. He often thought of the men he’d known—the warlike ones, or just the plain obstinate—of their enviable ability to overlook and to ignore. It was like a kind of wilful illiteracy, as if all the moments of unmanly passion and doubt, all the frail details that gave substance to their lives, were simply written in a tongue they couldn’t understand and so needed to condemn and belittle. It never occurred to them that to despise the small things was to despise themselves—not to mention the truth. But then that was the tragedy of all posturing.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“The thought comes upon her, not with stealth or clamour, but with the presumption of a slave owner, of one who sees no boundaries save their own.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“She whispered to herself in that paradoxical voice we all bear within us, the one that speaks the most wretched truths and the most beguiling lies, the one that is most us, and so not quite us at all. She whispered, “This is a dream.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“He was a brilliant but nervous man, one who could bloom and wilt in the course of speaking a single sentence. He was one of those men who were far too conscious of their own eyes. They had the habit of darting around the point of your own, but more ritually than randomly, as though they followed some formal rule of avoidance, rather than any instinctive antipathy to the prick of contact. Those rare times he did manage a level gaze, it was with a penetration and intensity that boiled away to nothing in a matter of heartbeats and left you feeling at once superior and strangely exposed.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Sorcery, she says, leaves only scars.” “She’s right.” “But what if scars are all you have?”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“His look neither accused nor questioned but remained mild in the manner of bored assassins. Incurious.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“But who are you, man, to answer God thus? Will what is made say to him who made it—Why have you made me this way? Does the potter not have power over his clay, to make, from the same mass, one vessel for honour, and another for dishonour? ROMANS 9:20–21”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye

“Achamian had almost forgotten what it was like, watching men about their fires. The arms folded against the chill. The mouths smiling, laughing, tongue and teeth peeking in and out of firelight. The gazes hopping from face to face within the cage of camaraderie, only to return to the furnace coals during the inevitable lulls. At first it struck him as something fearful, an exposing of what humans do when they turn their backs to the world, their interiority laid bare to the vaults of dark infinity, cracked open like oysters, with no walls save a warlike nature. But as the moments passed, he found the sight more and more affecting, to the point of feeling old and maudlin. That in a place so vast and so dark creatures this frail would dare gather about sparks called light. They seemed at once precious and imperiled, like jewels mislaid across open ground, something sure to be scooped up by jealous enormities.”
― R. Scott Bakker, The Judging Eye