Robert Jordan Quotes

“Bound by the Oath against lying, Aes Sedai [carry] the half-truth, the quarter-truth and the implication to arts.”

“Browns seek knowledge, Blues meddle in causes, and Whites consider the questions of truth with implacable logic. We all do some of it all, of course. But to be Green means to stand ready. In the Trolloc Wars, we were often called the Battle Ajah. All Aes Sedai helped where and when they could, but the Green Ajah alone was always with the armies, in almost every battle. We were the counter to the dreadlords. The Battle Ajah. And now we stand ready, for the Trollocs to come south again, for Tarmon Gai'don. the Last Battle. We will be there. That is what it means to be Green. -Alanna”

“Give me your trust, said the Aes Sedai.On my shoulders I support the sky.Trust me to know and to do what is best,And I will take care of the rest.But trust is the color of a dark seed growing.Trust is the color of a heart's blood flowing.Trust is the color of a soul's last breath.Trust is the color of death.Give me your trust said the queen on her throne,for I must bear the burden alone.Trust me to lead and to judge and to rule, and no man will think you a fool.But trust is the sound of the grave-dog's bark.Trust is the sound of betrayal in the dark.Trust is the sound of a soul's last breath.Trust is the sound of death.”

“The old blood is indeed still strong in the Two Rivers.”

“What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century, Darwin was to the nineteenth.”

“Mindfulness is observing and asking why. Millions saw the apple fall but Newton asked why.”

“On a visit to the space program, President Kennedy asked me about the satellite. I told him that it would be more important than sending a man into space. “Why?” he asked. “Because,” I said, “this satellite will send ideas into space, and ideas last longer than men.”

“There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.”

“There was yet another disadvantage attaching to the whole of Newton’s physical inquiries, ... the want of an appropriate notation for expressing the conditions of a dynamical problem, and the general principles by which its solution must be obtained. By the labours of LaGrange, the motions of a disturbed planet are reduced with all their complication and variety to a purely mathematical question. It then ceases to be a physical problem; the disturbed and disturbing planet are alike vanished: the ideas of time and force are at an end; the very elements of the orbit have disappeared, or only exist as arbitrary characters in a mathematical formula.”

“What goes up must come down.”