Matthew Stover Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

... I suspect that pain means little to you as your life—but both your life and your pain are very important to me.

Matthew Stover
His destiny had betrayed him, had made him a destroyer on a scale that humbled even Caine. Destiny, he understood with bitter certainty, could not be trusted.

Matthew Stover
A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.

Matthew Stover
Shit, kid, thinking about that makes me all warm and fuzzy inside, like I just ate a kitten.

Matthew Stover
I don't have to stop you. All I have to do is slow you down." -Ganner Rhysode

Matthew Stover
The truth is always greater than the words we use to describe it.

Matthew Stover
A tale is told of twin boys born to different mothers. One is dark by nature, the other light. One is rich, the other poor. One is harsh, the other gentle. One is forever youthful, the other old before his time. One is mortal. They share no bond of blood or sympathy, but they are twins nonetheless. They each live without ever knowing that they are brothers. They each die fighting the blind god.

Matthew Stover
Maybe. A powerful. Enough. Metaphor. Grows. Its own. Truth.

Matthew Stover
This truth: that he, the avatar of light, Supreme Master of the Jedi Order, the fiercest, most impeccable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known... just- didn't- have it.

Matthew Stover
Jedi do not fight for peace. That's only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm.

Matthew Stover
Oh, sure. What's this supposed to teach me?" "Is it what the teacher teaches? Or what the students learns?" "What's the difference?" "That is, itself, a question worth considering, yes?" -Jacen & Vergere

Matthew Stover
And in the name of this gospel of freedom, she had imprisoned herself; in the name of "living life honestly," she would go to her death. It was, he supposed, the only way she could make herself feel special.

Matthew Stover
A religion that teaches you God is something outside the world—something separate from everything you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear—is nothing but a cheap hustle.

Matthew Stover
Anyone who is of a thoughtful, philisophical cast of mind will occasionaly be struck by the appearance of certain organizing principles of history. The forms these principles seem to take inevitably depends upon one's specific obsession. For a mornachist, history is a struggle of classes of economic civil war. An agriculturalist sees the dynamic of populations, land, and availability of food; a philosopher might speak of the will to power or the will to sythesis; a theologian of the will of God.

Matthew Stover
Life is mere chance only when one allows it to be.

Matthew Stover
The capacity for personal freedom is a rare talent. Talent exists to be used. We do not ask sheep to be wolves; we, the wolves, do not ask ourselves to be sheep. Sheep can make such rules as happen to suit them—but it's foolishly naive to expect wolves to obey.

Matthew Stover
It is in the darkest night that the light we are shines brightest

Matthew Stover
Being old enough to know better but still too young to resist mostly sucks.

Matthew Stover
He had no idea what he should do now. Without destiny to guide him, he was lost in a vast, whistling darkness. Any direction he might choose was purely abitary; it would make no more sense, offer no more hope, than would sitting still. Which offered neither sense nor hope at all.

Matthew Stover
Don't care about gods. Gods are irrelevant. What counts is people. What counts is having respect for each other.

Matthew Stover
The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins. It always wins because it is everywhere. It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun, and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet. The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

Matthew Stover
Pain is itself a god: the taskmaster of life. Pain cracks the whip, and all that lives will move. To live is to be a slave to pain.

Matthew Stover
When the gods would punish us, they answer our prayers.

Matthew Stover
I read once, somewhere, that the way you know you've grown up is when your future death becomes a stone in your shoe: when you feel it with every step.

Matthew Stover
It's customary, at times like this, to say a few words. A man shouldn't die with no understanding of why he's been murdered. I do not pride myself on my eloquence, and so I will keep this simple.

Matthew Stover
"I respect what is repectable," Tan'elkoth replied. "To ask for respect where none has been earned is childish maundering. And what is repectable, in the end, save service? Even your idol Jefferson is, in the end, measured by how well he served the species. The prize of individualism—its goal—is self-actualization, which is only another name for vanity. We do not admire men for achieving self-actualization; we admire self-actualization when its end result is a boon to humanity."

Matthew Stover
We can each sit and wait to die, from the very day of our births. Those of us who do not do so, choose to ask—and to answer—the two questions that define every conscious creature: What do I want? and What will I do to get it? Which are, finally, only one question: What is my will? Caine teaches us that the answer is always found within our own experience; our lives provide the structure of the question, and a properly phrased question contains its own answer.

Matthew Stover
Fairy tales—simple stories for simple minds, a breath of air to cool brows overheated by the complexities of real life.

Matthew Stover
When you always know what is right, where is freedom? No one chooses the wrong, Jacen Solo. Uncertainty sets you free." -Vergere

Matthew Stover
He did understand. Finally, fatally, he did. He had thought he was the master of history, that his fractal world-tree had grown according to his will. He had allowed himself to be deceived.

Matthew Stover