It’s all very well to put the government in the hands of the perfect man, but what do you do when the perfect man gets a bellyache?
Nothing that ever happens is so unimportant that it doesn’t change things.
All I knew was that I would die if he sent me away. He shrugged. You can cut a man’s heart out with a shrug, did you know that?
Impatience is a poor substitute for a well-considered plan.
The whole world is beautiful, Belgarion’ Eriond assured him in response to that unspoken thought. ‘You just have to know how to look at it.
If you’d just try, I’m sure you’d be able to fly.
My Lord, I find thy face apelike and thy form misshapen. Thy beard, moreover, is an offense against decency, resembling more closely the scabrous fir which doth decorate the hinder portion of a mongrel dog than a proper adornement for a human face. Is it possible that thy mother, seized by some wild lechery, did dally at some time past with a randy goat? -Mandorallen.
One of the less attractive aspects of human nature is our tendency to hate the people we haven’t treated very well; it’s much easier than accepting guilt. If we can convince ourselves that the people we betrayed or enslaved were subhuman monsters in the first place, then our guilt isn’t nearly so black as we secretly know that it is. Humans are very, very good at shifting blame and avoiding guilt.
Why are the people all so unhappy?” he asked Mister Wolf. “They have a stern and demanding God,” Wolf replied. “Which God is that?” Garion asked. “Money,” Wolf said.
Life without any wonder left in it is flat and stale.
The stars were better company anyway. They were very beautiful, and they almost never snored.
What I’m trying to say, Garion,’ Durnik continued seriously, ’is that you can’t go through life being afraid of what you are. If you do that, sooner or later somebody will come along who’ll misunderstand, and you’ll have to do something to show him that it’s not him that you’re afraid of.
Refusing to talk about something wouldn’t make it go away. If it was there, it was there, and no amount of verbal acrobatics could make it go away.
Some day, Prince Kheldar, you will fall in love,” the queen said with a little smirk, “and the twelve kingdoms will stand around and chortle over the fall of so notorious a bachelor.
Being afraid was not the sort of thing that endangered life or limb, but it was still an injury of sorts – and sometimes a deeper and more serious kind of injury.
A man should never miss an opportunity to keep his mouth shut.
Don’t throw good ideas away until you’ve considered all of your options.
Priests are pretty much the same the world over. They seem to feel that their exclusive contact with God gives them a certain job security.
Now there’s something for you to think about. If you don’t know that you can’t do something, isn’t there a remote possibility that you’ll go ahead and do it anyway in absolute defiance of physical law? That might be one of the drawbacks of education. If you don’t know that you can’t pick yourself up by the scruff of the neck and hold yourself at arm’s length, maybe you can.
It’s common knowledge that the “church” is nothing more than an invention of the priesthood designed to swindle the ordinary people of the empire out of just about everything they own.