Steven Brust Quotes

19 Sourced Quotes

To seek understanding before taking action, yet to trust my instincts when action is called for. Never to avoid danger from fear, never to seek out danger for its own sake. Never to conform to fashion from fear of eccentricity, never to be eccentric from fear of conformity.

Steven Brust
No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style.

Steven Brust
The struggle is always worthwhile, if the end be worthwhile and the means honorable; foreknowledge of defeat is not sufficient reason to withdraw from the contest.

Steven Brust
A stupid person can make only certain, limited types of errors; the mistakes open to a clever fellow are far broader. But to the one who knows how smart he is compared to everyone else, the possibilities for true idiocy are boundless.

Steven Brust
Appropriate action means to advance your own goals, without unintentional harm to anyone else.

Steven Brust
It isn't always easy to act on what's in your head instead of what's in your heart. And it isn't always right to. The whole trick to knowing what to do is deciding when to make yourself listen to your head, and when it's okay to just follow your feelings.

Steven Brust
Why do you work so hard to make yourself disliked? I should think you'd find it happens enough on its own without putting yourself to any extra trouble.

Steven Brust
True heroics must be carefully planned - and strenuously avoided.

Steven Brust
I have something to tell you." "How, you have something to tell me?" "You have understood me exactly." "Well, I am listening." "Listening? Then, you wish me to tell you?" "Yes, that is it. I am listening, and therefore I wish you to tell me." "Shall I tell you now?" "No.

Steven Brust
Still, all this time, I was only barely aware that my subconscious was putting together a layout of the house. It wasn't that I expected to need one, it's just how my mind works. I am, quite frankly, very good at it, and maybe that's where the real pleasure comes in—just the joy of doing something you do well. There are worse reasons for doing things; maybe there aren't any better ones.

Steven Brust
What's the point of having weak enemies? They just waste your time.

Steven Brust
Most people seem to take pleasure in feeling superior to someone. I'm not like that, which pleases me because it makes me feel superior.

Steven Brust
It's just that no one wants to be the one being rescued, we all want to do the rescuing.

Steven Brust
Stalin is the perfect example of what I was talking about. To simply call him corrupt tells us nothing useful. What circumstances put him into power? What objective pressures, as well as subjective characteristics, led him to make the decisions he made? I'm currently reading Trotsky's writings from 1932 (scary how accurately he predicts the way WWII would play out), and analyzing the details of why Stalin did as he did is far more complex and useful than just, 'power corrupts.'
And it is even more true for the other great dictators of the 20th Century: I don't think you can even say that Hitler and Mussolini were corrupt: they came to power in order to do the very things they did.

Steven Brust
The others followed, and found themselves in a small, stuffy basement, which would have been damp, smelly, close, and dark, were it not, in fact, well-lit, which prevented it from being dark.

Steven Brust
It is always man's ideas which drive his actions. This has, at times, resulted in great evil; but as we look around us, we cannot doubt that it has resulted in greater good.

Steven Brust
There are millions of ways for people to die, if you number each vital organ, each ways it can fail, all the poisons from the earth and the sea which can cause these failures.

Steven Brust
When there's nothing you can do except worry, that's a good time to worry.

Steven Brust
When I say that life is like an onion, I mean this: if you don't do anything with it, it goes rotten. So far, that's no different from other vegetables. But when an onion goes bad, it can either do it from the inside, or the outside. So sometimes you see one that looks good, but the core is rotten. Other times, you can see a bad spot on it, but if you cut that out, the rest is fine. Tastes sharp, but that's what you paid for, isn't it?

Steven Brust