Top 200 Bernard Cornwell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Tell Ragnall,” I told him, “that the Saxons of Mercia are coming. Tell him that his dead will number in the thousands. Tell him that his own death is just days away. Tell him that promise comes from Uhtred of Bebbanburg.”

— Bernard Cornwell

102. “I knew a man who had a dumb wife. He was ever so happy.”

— Bernard Cornwell

103. “If a man can’t remember the laws,” Ragnar said, “then he’s got too many of them.”

— Bernard Cornwell

104. “Be mad enough, his father once said, and they will either lock you away or make you a saint.”

— Bernard Cornwell

105. “I have lived my life, Derfel,’ he said at last, ’according to oaths. I know no other way. I resent oaths, and so should all men, for oaths bind us, they hobble our freedom, and who among us doesn’t want to be free? But if we abandon oaths then we abandon guidance. We fall into chaos. We just fall. We become no better than beasts.”

— Bernard Cornwell

106. “Anger leads to savagery,′ I said curtly, ’and to stupidity.”

— Bernard Cornwell

107. “Men do not relish the shield wall. They do not rush to death’s embrace. You look ahead and see the overlapping shields, the helmets, the glint of axes and spears and swords, and you know you must go into the reach of those blades, into the place of death, and it takes time to summon the courage, to heat the blood, to let the madness overtake caution.”

— Bernard Cornwell

108. “You must have faith. Miracles make belief easy, which is why you should never pray for one. Much better to find God through faith than through miracles.”

— Bernard Cornwell

109. “You never, ever, tell others of your crimes, not unless they are so big as to be incapable of concealment, and then you describe them as policy or statecraft.”

— Bernard Cornwell

110. “War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumor, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.”

— Bernard Cornwell

111. “I had learned to hide my soul, or perhaps I was confused. Northumbrian or Dane? Which was I? What did I want to be?”

— Bernard Cornwell

112. “Thou shalt not kill, they preached, then screamed at us warriors to slaughter the pagans. Thou shalt not steal, they preached, and forged charters to take men’s lands. Thou shalt not commit adultery, they preached, and rutted other men’s wives like besotted hares in springtime.”

— Bernard Cornwell

113. “Love’s madness, swinging from ecstasy to despair in one wild second.”

— Bernard Cornwell

114. “He sounded pathetic and he knew it, but he had been driven to this humiliation by love. A woman can do that. They have power. We might all say that the oath to our lord is the strong oath that guides our lives, the oath that binds us and rules all the other oaths, but few men would not abandon every oath under the sun for a woman. I have broken oaths. I am not proud of that, but almost every oath I broke was for a woman.”

— Bernard Cornwell

115. “So I woke, I listened, and I heard the small sounds of a wood at night, the things moving, the claws in the dead leaves, the wind’s soft sighs.”

— Bernard Cornwell

116. “I had no idea what I was speaking of, but only knew I must sound confident. Fear might work on a man, but confidence fights against fear. Odda.”

— Bernard Cornwell

117. “To ask another man’s blessing is simply to avoid taking the responsibility.”

— Bernard Cornwell

118. “I think only one man in three is a warrior, and sometimes not even that many, but in our army, Uhtred, every man is a fighter. If you do not want to be a warrior you stay home in Denmark. You till the soil, herd sheep, fish the sea, but you do not take to the ships and become a fighter. But here in England? Every man is forced to the fight, yet only one in three or maybe only one in four has the belly for it. The rest are farmers who just want to run. We are wolves fighting sheep.”

— Bernard Cornwell

119. “And I looked,′ Pyrlig said to me, ‘and I saw a pale horse, and the rider’s name was death.’ I just stared in amazement. ‘It’s in the gospel book,’ he explained sheepishly, ’and it just cam to mind.”

— Bernard Cornwell

120. “Besides, as I have never tired of telling my Christian followers, we pagans rarely persecute Christians. We believe there are many gods, so we accept another man’s religion as his own affair, while Christians, who perversely insist that there is only one god, think it their duty to kill, maim, enslave, or revile anyone who disagrees.”

— Bernard Cornwell

121. “I stood on the dead horse and spread my arms. I held the shield high to my left and the sword to my right, and my mail coat was spattered with blood and the snow fell about my wolf-crested helmet and all I knew was the young man’s joy of slaughter. “I killed Ubba Lothbrokson!” I shouted at them. “I killed him! So come and join him! Taste his death! My sword wants you!”

— Bernard Cornwell

122. “The art of war,” I told him, “is to make the enemy do your bidding.”

— Bernard Cornwell

123. “And then I had ridden from the east in the glory of a warrior, which is what I am and always have been. All my life I have followed the path of the sword. Given a choice, and I have been given many choices, I would rather draw a blade than settle an argument with words, for that is what a warrior does, but most men and women are not fighters.”

— Bernard Cornwell

124. “We have forgotten that courage is a choice and that permission to move forward with boldness is never given by fearful masses.”

— Bernard Cornwell

125. “One of the things I can’t stand about Christians is their admiration of meekness. Imagine elevating meekness into a virtue! Meekness! Can you imagine a heaven filled only with the meek? What a dreadful idea. The food would get cold while everyone passed the dishes to everyone else. Meekness is no good, Derfel. Anger and selfishness, those are the qualities that make the world march.”

— Bernard Cornwell

126. “Book tours and research provide a lot of travel – too much, I sometimes think, but we do take vacations.”

— Bernard Cornwell

127. “Guinevere grimaced. ‘Do you know how cloying love can be, Derfel? I don’t want to be worshipped. I don’t want every whim granted. I want to feel there’s something biting back.”

— Bernard Cornwell

128. “The Immortals were about to engage the Impregnable. The unbeaten would fight the unbeatable.”

— Bernard Cornwell

129. “His men howled with him. They were caught up in Baird’s madness. At this hour, under the fire of the sun and emboldened by the arrack and rum they had drunk in their long wait in the trenches, the redcoats and sepoys had become gods of war. They gave death with impunity as they followed a warmaddened Scotsman down an enemy wall that was sticky with blood. Baird would have his city or else he would die in its dust.”

— Bernard Cornwell

130. “Pyrlig laughed. “Being alive is bad in a Christian! We say people are saints if they’re good, but how few of us become saints? We’re all bad! Some of us just try to be good.”

— Bernard Cornwell

131. “An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.”

— Bernard Cornwell

132. “Folk tell their children that success lies in working hard and being thrifty, but that is as much nonsense as supposing that a badger, a fox and a wolf could build a church. The way to wealth is to become a Christian bishop or a monastery’s abbot and thus be imbued with heaven’s permission to lie, cheat and steal your way to luxury.”

— Bernard Cornwell

133. “You’ll call me a damned Jew, a Christ murderer, a secret worshipper of pigs and a kidnapper of christian children.” This was all said cheerfully. “How absurd! Who would want to kidnap children, Christian or otherwise? Vile things. The only mercy of children is that they grow up, as my son has but then, tragically, they beget more children. We do not learn life’s lessons.”

— Bernard Cornwell

134. “He was a startlingly handsome young man, and that, too, distracted him for girls were attracted to him like priests to gold.”

— Bernard Cornwell

135. “Yes, sir,” Hicks said. He was a small young man, very officious, who would never contradict a superior. If Morris claimed the clouds were made of cheese Hicks would just stand to attention, twitch his nose, and swear blind he could smell Cheddar.”

— Bernard Cornwell

136. “Writing is a solitary occupation.”

— Bernard Cornwell

137. “We are almost men, not quite warriors, and on some fateful day we meet an enemy for the first time and we hear the chants of battle, the threatening clash of blades on shields, and we begin to learn that the poets are wrong and that the proud songs lie.”

— Bernard Cornwell

138. “Five things make a man happy,” I told him, “a good ship, a good sword, a good hound, a good horse, and a woman.” “Not a good woman?” Finan asked, amused. “They’re all good,” I said, “except when they’re not, and then they’re better than good.”

— Bernard Cornwell

139. “How can a god disapprove of a good hump?”

— Bernard Cornwell

140. “And afterwards, you recall little, except the blows that so nearly killed you. You work and push and stab to make an opening in their shield wall. And then you grunt and lunge and slash to widen the gap. And only then does the madness take over. As the enemy breaks and you can begin to kill like a god. Because the enemy is scared and running or scared and frozen. And all they can do is die while you harvest souls.”

— Bernard Cornwell

141. “Yet to complain of the world’s unfairness was the same as grumbling that the sun was hot or that the wind sometimes changed its direction. Unfairness existed, it always had and it always would, and the miracle, to Sharpe’s eyes, was that some men like Hill and Wellesley, though they had become wealthy and privileged through unfair advantages, were nevertheless superb at what they did.”

— Bernard Cornwell

142. “Everything ends. Summer ends. Happiness ends. Days of joy are followed by days of sorrow. Even the gods will meet their end in the last battle of Ragnarok when all the evil of the world brings chaos and the sun will turn dark, the black waters will drown the homes of men, and the great beamed hall of Valhalla will burn to ashes. Everything ends.”

— Bernard Cornwell

143. “Tomorrow,” he shouted, “you do not fight for me! I fight for you! I fight for Wessex! I fight for your wives, for your children and your homes! Tomorrow we fight and, I swear to you on my father’s grave and on my children’s lives, tomorrow we shall win!”

— Bernard Cornwell

144. “An army isn’t made of its officers, you know, though we officers like to think it is. An army is no better than its men, and when you find good men, you must look after them. That’s an officer’s job.”

— Bernard Cornwell

145. “Passion, Baird reckoned, was what would take men across the river and up the breach. Damn scientific soldiering now. The science of siege warfare had opened the city, but only a screaming and insane passion would take men inside.”

— Bernard Cornwell

146. “Hengall the Warrior hated war. The business of life, he liked to say, is to plant grain, not blades.”

— Bernard Cornwell

147. “They’re the sort of dozy bastards who don’t think beyond their next pot of ale, but Thomas does, Thomas is a two-pot thinker, he is.”

— Bernard Cornwell

148. “There is a greater war, Uhtred. Not the fight between Saxon and Dane, but between God and the devil, between good and evil! We are part of it!”

— Bernard Cornwell

149. “I once asked a bishop whether there were any women in heaven. ‘Of course there are, my lord,’ he answered, happy that I was taking an interest in doctrine, ‘many of the most blessed saints are women.’ ‘I mean women we can hump, bishop.’ He said he would pray for me. Perhaps he did.”

— Bernard Cornwell

150. “All men have enemies, otherwise they’re not men.”

— Bernard Cornwell