When the souls rise up in glory, yours shall not be shunned nor sunderered, but shall be the prize of the gods' gardens. Even your darkness shall be treasured then, and all your pain made holy.

What you are is a question only you can answer.

Hunting hawks did not belong in cages, no matter how much a man coveted their grace, no matter how golden the bars. They were far more beautiful soaring free. Heartbreakingly beautiful.

War is not its own end, except in some catastrophic slide into absolute damnation. It's peace that's wanted. Some better peace than the one you started with.

But when he’s cut, I bleed.

Anything worth achieving is worth overachieving.

It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project. Turn it on, see if it smokes.

The fourth approved approach for the problem of frontally attacking a guarded wormhole was to shoot the officer who suggested it.

And this was your friend?" Cordelia raised her eyebrows. "Seems to me the only difference between your friends and your enemies is how long the stand around chatting before they shoot you.

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

You go on. You just go on. There's nothing more to it, and there's no trick to make it easier. You just go on.

He's not too short. He's just... concentrated.

History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.

Change is possible.' 'Change is inevitable.

People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damned rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

Miles added it to his life's lessons list. Call it Rule 27B. Never make key tactical decisions while having electro-convulsive seizures.

All true wealth is biological (Aral Vorkosigan)

I don’t duel, boy. I kill as a soldier kills, which is as a butcher kills, as quickly, efficiently, and with as least risk to myself as I can arrange.

…the trouble with oaths of the form, death before dishonor, is that eventually, given enough time and abrasion, they separate the world into two sorts of people: the dead, and the forsworn.

For a while, I thought I was going mad. At last, I became reconciled to my despair. The medications helped, too, I thought, sir.

It’s not that I’m not upset; it’s just that I’m too tired to run up and down the corridor screaming.

Stupidity can be as bad as malice

I miss it every minute, and I have no wish at all to go back.

I wonder if we should add a box to tick off -- Reason for travel: creepy planetary conquest... no, I suppose not.

He was shaken by an unwelcome insight. Lives did not add as integers. They added as infinities.

Gardens were meant to be seen, smelled, walked through, grubbed in. A hundred objective measurements didn't sum the worth of a garden; only the delight of its users did that.

Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.

Colonel Otto, do you have a, perhaps, fuller and more detailed account than your preliminary one of why my Imperial Security building is now largely an underground installation? From a technical perspective.

The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.

If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher's cleaver.

A thousand years may scare form a state. An hour may lay it in ruins.

A celebrity is one who is known to many persons he is glad he doesn't know.

The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Let none think to fly the danger for soon or late love is his own avenger.

Shelley is truth itself and honour itself notwithstanding his out-of-the-way notions about religion.

Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.

In England the only homage which they pay to Virtue - is hypocrisy.

Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life - and if Virtue is not its own reward I don't know any other stipend annexed to it.

I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.

'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come.

America is a model of force and freedom and moderation - with all the coarseness and rudeness of its people.

This man is freed from servile bands, Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; Lord of himself, though not of lands, And leaving nothing, yet hath all.

I have always believed that all things depended upon Fortune, and nothing upon ourselves.

For in itself a thought, a slumbering thought, is capable of years, and curdles a long life into one hour.

I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.