Sharp it away, lad, sharp it away," the burly guardsman said, making the blade skitter across the whetstone, "lest otherways ye'll be a girl afore ye… - Tad Williams

You have something that might be more use to me than either gold or power—something that in fact brings both in its train."
"And what is that?"
The count leaned forward. "Knowledge.

In my experience," he said with more than a touch of bitterness, "the gods do not seem to care much what their servants deserve—or at least the rewards they give are too subtle for my understanding.

“Neither War nor Violent Death,” Morgenes had written, “have anything uplifting about them, yet they are the candle to which Humanity flies again and again, as complacently as the lowly moth. He who has been upon a battlefield, and who is not blinded by popular conceptions, will confirm that on this ground Mankind seems to have created a Hell on Earth out of sheer impatience, rather than waiting for that original to which—if the priests are correct—most of us will eventually be ushered.