💬 Quotes

"I think it’s possible to fall in love with a city, just like a person."

"To everything, human beings are a prey; but especially to the bitter sweetness of their own desires."

"Our whole life is based on the idea of combat—competition, struggle for existence, the war of man with man. We call it civilization, but it is largely a survival of the predatory stage."

"A world where half the people are raised to be parasitic, and the other half are raised to support them, can never reach true human development."

"In our land, we do not think of mothering as a life sentence that cuts a woman off from the world; we think of it as the highest public service, the very root of human culture."

"You men have made a world of giant progress in machinery and science, yet remain veritable infants in the art of social combination and peaceful living."

"Some birds are meant to be caged, and some men are meant to be kings. But a king who cannot keep his own house in order is no king at all."

"Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities."

"Words are wind. They blow away as easily as they are spoken, but actions remain carved in stone."

"My father used to say that any man who must say 'I am the king' is no true king at all."

"The gods have no mercy, that’s why they are gods. It is the men who dream of mercy who suffer the most."

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."

"I will make a world where there is no Dust. I will make a world where there is no temptation, no sin, and no death."

"You must be brave, Lyra. You must be like a little knife yourself, sharp and bright and cutting through everything."

"Everything is connected. You cannot pull on a thread without disturbing the rest of the web."

"To be a person is to be a creature who has to make choices, and every choice has a price."

"When you choose one path, you must give up all the others. That is the nature of the world."

"The knife doesn't just cut matter; it cuts through the truth itself. It is a tool for changing the shape of what we are allowed to know."

"A king may rule the land, but it is the warrior who conquers the hearts of men."

"To lose one's faith in humanity is to lose one's faith in the future."