Brandon Sanderson Quotes

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.

It was a frantic, insane brawl for power.

Every army needed someone to run at the front and soak up arrows.

Why, Jasnah? Why have you always denied me?

Jasnah couldn’t help but smile. For over a decade, she’d dreamed of uniting the best minds of the kingdom in a coordinated effort. She’d been ignored; all anyone had wanted to discuss was her lack of belief in their god. Well, they were focused now. Turned out the end of the world had to actually arrive before people would take it seriously.

In my painful experience, the truth may be simple, but it is rarely easy.

Who would have thought that bearing an ancient, divine mantle of power and honor would involve so many meetings?

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 you should try to understand what they want out of life, and respect that, rather than projecting onto them what you think they should want out of life.

I’d hoped…I’d hoped you could tell me, give me an absolute right. For once, I’d like my moral code not to come with a list of exceptions at the end.

He needed more than vague explanations and abstract ideas—but those were the very soul of art. If you could explain something perfectly, then you’d never need art. That was the difference between a table and a beautiful woodcutting. You could explain the table: its purpose, its shape, its nature. The woodcutting you simply had to experience.

Morality is not a thing you can simply doff to put on the helm of battle, then put back on when you’re done with the slaughter.

Curious, how quickly tyrants grow religious. It must that be convenient to tell yourself that your murders belong to the Almighty instead.

Dalinar bowed his head for a prayer. Let me be stronger than those who would kill me. Simple and to the point, the kind he figured the Almighty would prefer.

His sincerity was so unexpected. Dalinar had been around Alethi politicians so much that he found honesty an obscure thing, like a language he no longer spoke.