Top 500 Steven Erikson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The heart of wisdom is tolerance.”

— Steven Erikson

2. “The lesson of history is that no one learns.”

— Steven Erikson

3. “What makes a Malazan soldier so dangerous? They’re allowed to think.”

— Steven Erikson

4. “There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail – should we fall – we will know that we have lived.”

— Steven Erikson

5. “First in, Last out. Motto of the bridgeburners.”

— Steven Erikson

6. “For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.”

— Steven Erikson

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

7. “Paradise belonged to the innocent. Which was why it was and would ever remain empty. And that is what makes it a paradise.”

— Steven Erikson

8. “One day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.”

— Steven Erikson

9. “Show me a god that does not demand mortal suffering. Show me a god that celebrates diversity, a celebration that embraces even non-believers, and is not threatened by them. Show me a god that understands the meaning of peace. In life, not in death.”

— Steven Erikson

10. “Destiny is a lie. Destiny is justification for atrocity. It is the means by which murderers armour themselves against reprimand. It is a word intended to stand in place of ethics, denying all moral context.”

— Steven Erikson

11. “Betrayal was the greatest of all crimes, for it took all that was human within a person and made it a thing of pain. In the face of that, murder itself was surcease: it was quick, and it ended the anguish and despair of a life without hope.”

— Steven Erikson

12. “People don’t change to suit their god; they change their god to suit them.”

— Steven Erikson

13. “Shadow is ever besieged, for that is its nature. Whilst darkness devours, and light steals. And so one sees shadow ever retreat to hidden places, only to return in the wake of the war between dark and light.”

— Steven Erikson

14. “Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. From you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge. ‘Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper.”

— Steven Erikson

15. “Name none of the fallen, for they stand in our place, and stand there still in each moment of our lives. Let my death hold no glory, and let me die forgotten and unknown. Let it not be said that I was one among the dead to accuse the living.”

— Steven Erikson

16. “When you’ve burned the bridges behind you, don’t go starting a fire on the one in front of you.”

— Steven Erikson

17. “You are very easily exasperated, my dear. If you’re a leaf trembling on a wide, deep river, relax and ride the current. It’s always worked for me, I assure you.”

— Steven Erikson

18. “The tiger is humbled by memories of prey.”

— Steven Erikson

19. “The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins with love and ends with grief.”

— Steven Erikson

20. “In war everyone loses. This brutal truth can be seen in the eyes of every solider in every world.”

— Steven Erikson

21. “The future can ever promise but one thing and one thing only: surprises.”

— Steven Erikson

22. “Power is violence, its promise, its deed. Power cares nothing for reason, nothing for justice, nothing for compassion. It is, in fact, the singular abnegation of these things – once the cloak of deceits is stripped away, this one truth is revealed.”

— Steven Erikson

23. “The only death I fear is dying ignorant.”

— Steven Erikson

24. “All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear. So, I have plenty of sympathy for self-defense mechanisms, especially among artists.”

— Steven Erikson

25. “The harder the world, the fiercer the honour.”

— Steven Erikson

26. “Such is the vastness of his genius that he can outwit even himself.”

— Steven Erikson

27. “Wise words are like arrows flung at your forehead. What do you do? Why, you duck of course.”

— Steven Erikson

28. “Fear bespeaks of wisdom. Recognition of responsibility.”

— Steven Erikson

29. “I mean the only thing us dead soldiers got in common is that none of us was good enough or lucky enough to survive the fight. We’re a host of failures.”

— Steven Erikson

30. “Stones make no splash on a frozen lake.”

— Steven Erikson

31. “Morality was not relative, they claimed, nor even existing solely in the realm of human condition. No, they proclaimed morality was an imperative of all life, a natural law that was neither the brutal acts of beasts nor the lofty ambitions of humanity, but something other, something unassailable.”

— Steven Erikson

32. “Everyone was broken inside. It was just that some were more broken than others, and when they were broken bad inside, it was all they could do to keep the outside looking normal.”

— Steven Erikson

33. “The dust dreams of the world it had once been. But the dust, alas, does not command the wind.”

— Steven Erikson

34. “The gods know, happiness is a precious and rare commodity, and indeed it seems that the more intelligent and perceptive the individual, the less happy they generally are. The cost of seeing things as they are, I expect.”

— Steven Erikson

35. “It is an extraordinary act of courage,’ said Tulas Shorn, ‘to come to know a stranger’s pain. To even consider such a thing demands a profound dispensation, a willingness to wear someone else’s chains, to taste their suffering, to see with one’s own eyes the hue cast on all things – the terrible stain that is despair.”

— Steven Erikson

36. “There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it.”

— Steven Erikson

37. “We are all pushed into a world of madness, yet it must now fall to each of us to pull back from this Abyss, to drag ourselves free of the descending spiral. From horror, grief must be fashioned, and from grief, compassion.”

— Steven Erikson

38. “All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we’re going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.”

— Steven Erikson

39. “There was, in his mind, no truer measure of stupidity than to imagine that the world could be reduced to two sides, one facing the other with fangs bared, brandishing weapons and hurling hate at the enemy. Things were never so simple.”

— Steven Erikson

40. “Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal’s shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched before one now stretched before him.”

— Steven Erikson

41. “All they get around here is stories. Stories don’t make you bleed. Stories don’t make you go hungry, don’t give you sore feet. When you’re young smelling of pigshit and convinced there ain’t a weapon in all the damn world that’s going to hurt you, all stories do is make you want to be part of them.”

— Steven Erikson

42. “I warn you all, hatred is finding fertile soil within me. And in your compassion, in your every good intention, you nurture it.”

— Steven Erikson

43. “It is one thing to lead by example with half a dozen soldiers at your back. It is wholly another with ten thousand.”

— Steven Erikson

44. “None of these visions of creation did more than serve the vanity of those holding them. As if all was made for them; for their eyes to witness, for their wonder to behold. Rint did not believe it. The past had no beginning. Something always existed before, no matter how far back one reached.”

— Steven Erikson

45. “Oh yes, I have learned much from Tremorlor, and so assume a like strategy. Silence, a faint mocking smile suggesting I know more than I do, an air of mystery, yes, and fell knowledge. None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions!”

— Steven Erikson

46. “Ah, Fist, it’s the curse of history that those who should read them, never do.”

— Steven Erikson

47. “Children were meant to be gifts. The physical manifestation of love between a man and a woman. And for that love all manner of sacrifice could be borne.”

— Steven Erikson

48. “The heart is neither given nor stolen. The heart surrenders.”

— Steven Erikson

49. “Chaos needs no allies, for it dwells like a poison in every one of us.”

— Steven Erikson

50. “Justice without compassion was the destroyer of morality, a slayer blind to empathy.”

— Steven Erikson