Top 500 Joe Abercrombie Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Once you’ve got a task to do, it’s better to do it than live with the fear of it.”

— Joe Abercrombie

2. “Rules are for children. This is war, and in war the only crime is to lose.”

— Joe Abercrombie

3. “The fool strikes. The wise man smiles, and watches, and learns. Then strikes.”

— Joe Abercrombie

4. “I have learned all kinds of things from my many mistakes. The one thing I never learn is to stop making them.”

— Joe Abercrombie

5. “Truly, life is the misery we endure between disappointments.”

— Joe Abercrombie

6. “Well. What can we do, except try to do better?”

— Joe Abercrombie

7. “You have to realistic about these things.”

— Joe Abercrombie

8. “Proof is boring. Proof is tiresome. Proof is an irrelevance. People would far rather be handed an easy lie than search for a difficult truth, especially if it suits their own purposes.”

— Joe Abercrombie

9. “You can never have too many knives, his father had told him. Unless they’re pointed at you, and by people who don’t like you much.”

— Joe Abercrombie

10. “The truth is like salt. Men want to taste a little, but too much makes everyone sick.”

— Joe Abercrombie

11. “You should laugh every moment you live, for you’ll find it decidedly difficult afterwards.”

— Joe Abercrombie

12. “It’s hard to be done a favor by a man you hate. It’s hard to hate him so much afterwards. Losing an enemy can be worse than losing a friend, if you’ve had him for long enough.”

— Joe Abercrombie

13. “Strange, how the best moments of our lives we scarcely notice except in looking back.”

— Joe Abercrombie

14. “Good steel bends, but never breaks. Good steel stays always sharp and ready. Good steel feels no pain, no pity, and above all, no remorse.”

— Joe Abercrombie

15. “Sometimes it doesn’t matter too much what choice you make, as long as you make it quick and stick to it.”

— Joe Abercrombie

16. “Savor the little moments, son, that’s my advice. They’re what life is. All the little things that happen while you’re waiting for something else.”

— Joe Abercrombie

17. “Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.”

— Joe Abercrombie

18. “Belief without evidence is the very hallmark of the savage.”

— Joe Abercrombie

19. “My name is Nicomo Cosca, famed solider of fortune, and I am here for dinner.”

— Joe Abercrombie

20. “Love is a fine cushion to rest upon, but only hate can make you a better person.”

— Joe Abercrombie

21. “If life has taught me one thing, it’s that there are no villains. Only people, doing their best.”

— Joe Abercrombie

22. “If you want to be a new man you have to stay in new places, and do new things, with people who never knew you before. If you go back to the same old ways, what else can you be but the same old person?”

— Joe Abercrombie

23. “A friendship between a man and a woman was what you called it when one had been pursuing the other for a long time and never gotten anywhere.”

— Joe Abercrombie

24. “Course. Doing better next time. That’s what life is.”

— Joe Abercrombie

25. “Luck is a woman. She’s drawn to those that least deserve her.”

— Joe Abercrombie

26. “But you can’t truly hate a man without loving him first, and there’s always a trace of that love left over.”

— Joe Abercrombie

27. “There was no such thing as luck. Luck was a word idiots used to explain the consequences of their own rashness, and selfishness, and stupidity. More often than not bad luck meant bad plans.”

— Joe Abercrombie

28. “The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. Still, the struggle itself is worthwhile. Knowledge is the root of power, after all.”

— Joe Abercrombie

29. “Fools boast of what they will do. Heroes do it.”

— Joe Abercrombie

30. “When you’re planning what to do, always think of doing nothing first, see where that gets you.”

— Joe Abercrombie

31. “The trouble with being able to lift heavy things is that when heavy things need lifting folk step out of the way and smile at you.”

— Joe Abercrombie

32. “The tree is only as strong as its roots, and knowledge is the root of power.”

— Joe Abercrombie

33. “I’ve made peace with myself. Good for you. That’s the hardest war of all to win. Didn’t say I won. Just stopped fighting.”

— Joe Abercrombie

34. “You were a hero round these parts. That’s what they call you when you kill so many people the word murderer falls short.”

— Joe Abercrombie

35. “Death waits for us all. Nothing’s forever. Life’s about making the best of what you find along the way. A man who’s not content with what he’s got, well, more than likely he won’t be content with what he hasn’t.”

— Joe Abercrombie

36. “But you love to play the good man, don’t you? Do you know what’s worse than a villain? A villain who thinks he’s a hero. A man like that, there’s nothing he won’t do, and he’ll always find himself an excuse.”

— Joe Abercrombie

37. “You get what you give, in the long run, and manners cost nothing.”

— Joe Abercrombie

38. “Broken hearts heal with time, but broken teeth never do.”

— Joe Abercrombie

39. “We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged.”

— Joe Abercrombie

40. “Patience is as fearsome a weapon as rage. More so, in fact, ’cause fewer men have it.”

— Joe Abercrombie

41. “No one gets what they deserve.”

— Joe Abercrombie

42. “You have to learn to love the small things in life, like a hot bath. You have to love the small things, when you have nothing else.”

— Joe Abercrombie

43. “Words are weapons. They should be handled with proper care.”

— Joe Abercrombie

44. “The wise wait for their moment, but never let it pass.”

— Joe Abercrombie

45. “The wiser a man is, the more he stands ready to be educated.”

— Joe Abercrombie

46. “The older you get, the more swiftly the years pass. It’s easy to forget how quickly people die.”

— Joe Abercrombie

47. “Trust is like glass. Lovely, but only a fool rests lots of weight on it.”

— Joe Abercrombie

48. “You have to have fear to have courage.”

— Joe Abercrombie

49. “Comes to be everything reminds you of something past. Somewhere past. Someone. Yourself, maybe, how you were. The now gets fainter and the past more and more real. The future worn down to but a stub.”

— Joe Abercrombie

50. “People would far rather believe a lurid lie than a sorry string of accidents. Would far rather believe the world is full of evil than full of bad luck, selfishness and stupidity.”

— Joe Abercrombie