Top 100 R. Scott Bakker Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence.”

— R. Scott Bakker

52. “Given the manifest frailty of men, given the long succession of delusions that was their history, what could be more preposterous than claiming oneself the least deluded, let alone privy to the absolute?”

— R. Scott Bakker

53. “Here we find further argument for Gotagga’s supposition that the world is round. How else could all men stand higher than their brothers?”

— R. Scott Bakker

54. “Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.”

— R. Scott Bakker

55. “To resent is to brood in inaction, to pass through life acting in a manner indistinguishable from those who bear no grudges. But hatred hails from a wilder, far more violent tribe. Even when you cannot strike out, you strike nonetheless. Inward, if not outward, as if such things have direction. To hate, especially without recourse to vengeance, is to besiege yourself, to starve yourself to the point of eating your own, then to lay wreaths of blame at the feet of the accused.”

— R. Scott Bakker

56. “A lifetime of cannibal hatred.”

— R. Scott Bakker

57. “You can only believe so many lies before becoming one of them.”

— R. Scott Bakker

58. “There was such a difference, he thought, between the beauty that illuminated, and the beauty that was illuminated.”

— R. Scott Bakker

59. “Where power was perceived, power was given. For his entire life Conphas had been surrounded by tutors.”

— R. Scott Bakker

60. “Though all men be equally frail before the world, the differences between them are terrifying.”

— R. Scott Bakker

61. “Conviction, no matter how narcotic its depth, simply did not make true.”

— R. Scott Bakker

62. “All men are greater than dead men.”

— R. Scott Bakker

63. “Every woman knows there are only two kinds of men: those who feel and those who pretend. Always remember, my dear, though only the former can be loved, only the latter can be trusted. It is passion that blackens eyes, not calculation.”

— R. Scott Bakker

64. “And ‘barbarity,’ I fear, is simply a word for unfamiliarity that threatens.”

— R. Scott Bakker

65. “There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence.”

— R. Scott Bakker

66. “Convince a man to take a single step – after all, what earthly difference could one step make? – and he would walk the next mile to prove himself right.”

— R. Scott Bakker

67. “Like life, games were governed by rules. But unlike life, games were utterly defined by those rules. The rules were the game, and if one played by different rules, then one simply played a different game. Since a fixed framework of rules determined the meaning of every move as a move, games possessed a clarity that made life seen like a drunken brawl by comparison. The proprieties were indubitable, the permutations secure; only the outcome was shrouded.”

— R. Scott Bakker

68. “What did they know of motherhood, the mad miracle of finding your interior drawn from you, clinging and bawling and giggling and learning everything there was to learn anew?”

— R. Scott Bakker

69. “You realized those truths that cut against the interests of the powerful were called lies, and that those lies that served those interests were called truths.”

— R. Scott Bakker

70. “A cut scarred where a caress faded away.”

— R. Scott Bakker

71. “Conceit does not sit well with martyrdom.”

— R. Scott Bakker

72. “It’s the concert of knowledge and ignorance that underwrites our decisions.”

— R. Scott Bakker

73. “Exhaustion has a way of parting the veils between men, not so much because the effort of censoring their words exceeds them, but because weariness is the foe of volatility. Oft times insults that would pierce the wakeful simply thud against the sleepless and fatigued.”

— R. Scott Bakker

74. “But you do understand. Think, Leweth. If we’re nothing more than our thoughts and passions, and if our thoughts and passions are nothing more than movements of our souls, then we are nothing more than those who move us. Who you once were, Leweth, ceased to exist the moment your wife died.”

— R. Scott Bakker

75. “Fate was but one more world-born subterfuge, another lie men used to give meaning to their abject helplessness.”

— R. Scott Bakker

76. “Where the holy take men for fools, the mad take the world. –.”

— R. Scott Bakker

77. “Old women are more reconciled to death than old men. By bringing life to the world, we come to see ourselves as debtors. What’s given is taken.”

— R. Scott Bakker

78. “Ignorance was ever the iron of certainty, for it was as blind to itself as sleep. It was the absence of questions that made answers absolute – not knowledge! To.”

— R. Scott Bakker

79. “All men recited self-aggrandizing stories, words of ascendancy and exception, to balm the inevitable indignities of fact. An emperor need only repeat those stories to command the hearts of men.”

— R. Scott Bakker

80. “Where hard life makes some maudlin to the point of weeping at mere memory, it grants others a curious immunity to suffering. Like the slaves who work the charcoal pits, their skin grows hardened to the pinch of fire and coals, insensible to burning things.”

— R. Scott Bakker

81. “Power does not make safe. History murders the children of weak rulers.”

— R. Scott Bakker

82. “The genius of most men lay in finding reasons after their actions. The heart was ever self-serving, especially when the beliefs served involved sacrifice.”

— R. Scott Bakker

83. “I am my thoughts, but the sources of my thoughts exceed me. I do not own myself, because the darkness comes before me.”

— R. Scott Bakker

84. “Almost all men prized the familiar path over the true.”

— R. Scott Bakker

85. “Sometimes he would stare at the bare trees for so long, they would lose their radial dimensions and seem something flat, like blood smeared into the wrinkles about an old woman’s eyes.”

— R. Scott Bakker

86. “If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise.”

— R. Scott Bakker

87. “There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.”

— R. Scott Bakker

88. “Only madmen and historians, he said, believe their lies.”

— R. Scott Bakker

89. “Duty measures the distance between animal and the divine.”

— R. Scott Bakker

90. “It seemed poison had been poured into wonder’s own decanter.”

— R. Scott Bakker

91. “He saw clearly now why he so loved this species of war. On the field of battle, his every act was open to the scrutiny of others. Here, however, he stood outside scrutiny, enacted destiny from a place that transcended judgement or recrimination. He lay hidden in the womb of events. Like a God.”

— R. Scott Bakker

92. “That’s the horrible fact of sinners. We’re indistinguishable from the righteous.”

— R. Scott Bakker

93. “The air became dry and still, like the gap in a dead man’s mouth.”

— R. Scott Bakker

94. “This one thing every tyrant will tell you: nothing saves more lives than murder.”

— R. Scott Bakker

95. “The darkness was crisp, as though scraped of sight and smell by winter’s razor.”

— R. Scott Bakker

96. “Truths were carved from the identical wood as were lies – words – and so sank or floated with equal ease.”

— R. Scott Bakker

97. “Hoga Gothyelk no longer felt anger, not truly – only varieties of sorrow.”

— R. Scott Bakker

98. “If you find yourself taken unawares by someone you thought you knew, recall that the character revealed is as much your own as otherwise. When it comes to Men and their myriad, mercenary natures, revelation always comes in twos.”

— R. Scott Bakker

99. “Why me? A selfish question. Perhaps the most selfish of questions. All burdens, even those as demented as the Apocalypse, must fall upon the shoulders of someone. Why not him?”

— R. Scott Bakker

100. “Fools can be trusted precisely because they are fools. Their agendas rarely intersect with your own.”

— R. Scott Bakker