Michael F. Flynn Quotes

He dyed his hair with great art, maintaining enough gray to suggest wisdom, but not so much as to suggest age.

Brilliance cannot improvise on faulty data.

You have a grim taste in miracles, my friend.

There seemed no face within the cowl, only a black emptiness, and the notion sprang irresistibly to Dietrich’s mind that this was Death, now these dozen years overdue, treading a weary mountain trail in search of him. Then a flash of white showed within the shadow and Dietrich realized that it was only the angle of the sun that had made that hood seem so empty.

If people don’t leave a hole in your life when they are gone, Consuela, they were never in your life at all.

One does not debate nature; one experiences nature.

He believed because he wanted to believe. And that, too, is madness.

Sometimes the obvious is only wishful thinking.

He could not live again in Paris. It had seemed better then only because he had been younger, and had not yet known contentment.

You split hairs."
"Better to split hairs than the heads beneath them.

What the prisoner said made some sense. He could see how technological progress—and social change with it—was coupled with free trade and the free exchange of ideas. Yet, he wasn’t at all sure that it was necessarily a good thing. There was a lot to be said for stability and continuity.

Much as I would tend my manor in peace, peace needs the consent of all, while one alone may raise a war. I swore an oath to protect the defenseless and punish peace-breakers, and that includes peace-breaking Herrenfolk. Your priests say to forgive your enemy, and that is well, or revenge follows revenge until eternity. But between a man who will stop at nothing and one who will hesitate at anything, the advantage is generally to the former. The pagans had right, too. It is a false peace to be overforgiving. Your enemy may read forbearance as weakness and so be drawn to strike.

No field of knowledge is so transparently simple as another’s.

Had you learned to flatter the Kaiser, you would need not live in the back woods."
"Had you learned to live in the back woods, you would need not flatter the Kaiser.

She said nothing, but said it loudly.