Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”

Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”


“Denice, be wary of people who have answers to your problems. Those answers I have found for myself—the things that strike you as wisdom—are not your answers, and they are only my answers today. Tomorrow I will be a different person with different needs. The world and its people are too complex for any system of beliefs to fully address their complexity. The map does not hold; it can't. When you learn something for yourself, hold to it; but do not expect it to work for others. Sometimes it will. More often it will not.”


For governing a country well
there is nothing better than moderation.

The mark of a moderate man
is freedom from his own ideas.


He had spent all his life avoiding decisions, confident in his subordination that his hypothetical decisions would have surpassed those actually reached by the men and women he served. He had mistaken hesitancy for judiciousness and had owned the luxury of this mistake for so long as he was not called upon to actually judge. In hindsight (which he had similarly mistaken for wisdom), he always knew that he had ascertained the proper course. The error lay in not recognizing that proper course among so many others also ascertained.


In Part One of formal scientific method, which is the statement of the problem, the main skill is in stating absolutely no more than you are positive you know. It is much better to enter a statement "Solve Problem: Why doesn't cycle work?" which sounds dumb but is correct, than it is to enter a statement "Solve Problem: What is wrong with the electrical system?" when you don't absolutely know the trouble is in the electrical system. What you should state is "Solve Problem: What is wrong with cycle?" and then state as the first entry of Part Two: "Hypothesis Number One: The trouble is in the electrical system." You think of as many hypothesis as you can, then you design experiments to test them to see which are true and which are false.


You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.


“Doubt, Lady, is the chastity of the mind, […]”


“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…”


Ritual is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos.


In far too much traditional fantasy, and SF, and -- for that matter -- every branch of literature [...], the moral framework underlying the story is simply a postulate; that is to say, it's given that Some Things Are Evil, and Some Things Are Good. What these Things might be will differ from genre to genre -- and even from story to story -- but one distinction is clear: crap writing of all varieties is crammed with the premise (popularized by C.S. Lewis, who in most other ways behaved as if he were entirely sober) that "Good People simply Know, down deep, the difference between Right and Wrong."

One of the great uses of literature in general is to clue people in to the simple fact that this "Down-Deep Knowing" is only prejudice -- and that if you do believe in such imaginary abilities, it inevitably follows that everyone who disagrees with you (no matter how sincere and potent their own "Down-Deep Knowing") must be:

a) evil and must be destroyed;
b) deceived and must be enlightened;
c) liars whose hypocrisy must be exposed.

I don't think anyone in this country these days needs to be reminded just how pernicious such attitudes are.


Conviction, no matter how narcotic its depth, simply did not make true. This was a hard lesson, made all the harder by its astounding conspicousness. Despite the exhortations of kings and generals, despite the endless lays, belief unto death was cheap. After all, the Fanim threw themselves against the spears of their enemies as readily as the Inrithi. Someone had to be deluded. So what ensured that that someone was someone else? 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?

And to make such obvious conceit the grounds of condemnation … of murder …


As Einstein said, common sense—non-weirdness—is just a bundle of prejuidices acquired before the age of eighteen. The tests of truth are logical consistency, agreement with experience, and economy of explanation.


That is precisely what common sense is for, to be jarred into uncommon sense. One of the chief services which mathematics has rendered the human race in the past century is to put "common sense" where it belongs, on the topmost shelf next to the dusty canister labelled "discarded nonsense."


“There are people who love birds so much they free them. There are others who love them so much they cage them.”


“What distinguishes a flower from a weed is only—and exactly—this: the choice of the gardener.”


What frightens me when I travel is not that so many men possess customs and creeds so different from my own. Nay, what frightens me is that they think them as natural and as obvious as I think my own.


When strangers meet, great allowances should be made for differences of custom and training.

Remember you don't really own anything you can't carry at a dead run.


He who clings to his work
will create nothing that endures.

If you want to accord with the Tao,
just do your job, then let go.

The Master's power is like this.
He lets all things come and go
effortlessly, without desire.
He never expects results;
thus he is never disappointed.
He is never disappointed;
thus his spirit never grows old.


It's a great trick.

“Expect not, and you shall find glory everlasting …”—The Tractate, Book of Priests, 8:31. The famed “Expect Not Admonition” of Inri Sejenus, where he urges his followers to give without hope of exchange. The paradox, of course, is that by doing this, they hope for eternal paradise in exchange.

The more control, the more that requires control. This is the road to chaos.


When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.

If you don't trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.


For every force there is a counterforce.
Violence, even well intentioned,
always rebounds upon oneself.

The Master does his job
and then stops.
He understands that the universe
is forever out of control,
and that trying to dominate events
goes against the current of the Tao.
Because he believes in himself,
he doesn't try to convince others.
Because he is content with himself,
he doesn't need others' approval.
Because he accepts himself,
the whole world accepts him.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.


DARKNESS IS THE greatest teacher.

A tribe of the Quiet Land once had a rite of passage in which the aspirant was buried alive, deep beneath the earth, where no light could find him and no ear could hear his sobs and his screams. This was the final rite; after a span of days spent in such a coffin the aspirant was released, and numbered among the wise.

They did this because they knew:

Darkness is a knife that peels away the rind of what you think you know about yourself. The shades of your pretenses, the tones of your illusions, the layers of deception that glaze your life into the colors that tint your world—all mean nothing in the darkness. No one can see them, not even you.

Darkness hides everything except who you really are.


The fear of being found out drives many people to do things they shouldn't. Yes, you are a fraud. But so is everyone else, and most of us know it. Even good people are only good on average; even bad people are only bad on average. Admittedly, sometimes averages are much higher than others. Don't worry about being a good person or being a bad person; work on improving your average. Work on having good moments, rather than bad moments.


JC Denton: And if I do, what becomes of me?

Helios: You will be who you will be. We are our choices.


"I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself."


“Ajencis,” he continued, “once wrote that all men are frauds. Some, the wise, fool only others. Others, the foolish, fool only themselves. And a rare few fool both others and themselves—they are the rulers of Men… […] What about men who fool no one?”


"But everything you tell yourself should be the truth—or as close to it as you can come. You did what you did because you are who you are. Self-control, or its lack, had nothing to do with it."


Know thyself.


Knowing others is intelligence;
knowing yourself is true wisdom.
Mastering others is strength;
mastering yourself is true power.


“Unreasoning passion is the province of darkness,” Vergere said. “But an understood emotion is not unreasoning. That is why the route to mastery is through self-knowledge.” Her tilted eyes widened. “It's not possible to suppress all emotion, nor is it desirable. An emotionless person is no more than a machine. But to understand the origin and nature of one's feelings, that is possible.”


Castanaveras: Do you know what the commonest emotion is?

McKann: I can guess.

Castanaveras: No you can't. Guilt. This vast regret for the things that they've done that are wrong. Those are the people whose minds it hurts to contact, and they are far and away in the majority. The percentage of people who don't suffer from guilt is so vanishingly small I'm tempted to say that such people are not sane. Either they're not sane or the rest of us are not sane, and those of us who feel shame for things we've done far outnumber those who don't.

McKann: Isn't that one of the definitions of a sociopathic personality? The inability to feel guilt?

(Castanaveras is silent a long moment.)

Castanaveras: I'm not referring to such people. There are sociopaths, but not many, at least by percentage of the population. (Silence again.) Some people have—well, the best way I can say it is that they know themselves. They know who they are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and they are at peace with themselves. Those people, they don't do things that might make them uncomfortable. (Half smiles.) It must be nice.


You can't know it, but you can be it,
at ease in your own life.


“Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extend that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe, so that those who look upon you know this without hearing your name spoken. Some ancient poet said that the world is full of echoes and correspondences. Another wrote a long poem of an inferno, wherein each man suffered a torture which coincided in nature with those forces which had ruled his life. Being a god is being able to recognize within one's self these things that are important, and then to strike the single note that brings them into alignment with everything else that exists. Then, beyond morals or logic or esthetics, one is wind or fire, the sea, the mountains, rain, the sun or the stars, the flight of an arrow, the end of a day, the clasp of love. One rules through one's ruling passions.”


Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King;
Which every wise and virtuous man attains:
And who attains not, ill aspires to rule
Cities of men, or headstrong Multitudes,
Subject himself to Anarchy within,
Or lawless passions in him which he serves.


"[…] any unreasoning passion would do. When anger becomes rage, fear becomes terror, love becomes obsession, self-esteem becomes vainglory, then a natural and useful emotion becomes an unreasoning compulsion and the darkness is.”


When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it.
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow that he himself casts.


"No one gets over anything, don't you understand? Everything that happens in your life—every single thing— leaves a scar. A permanent scar. You're not supposed to get over it. To get over something—to erase the mark it left on you—erases part of who you are."


The he turned his mind to other matters and forced the mood from him. But in the days that followed, and even, on occasion, years afterward, it returned to plague his efforts and mock his joys, to make him wonder, know guilt, feel sadness and so be humbled.


All streams flow to the sea
because it is lower than they are.
Humility gives it its power.


She acts without expectation,
succeeds without taking credit,
and doesn't think that she is better than anyone else.