What binds a man to his land? What power within allows him to give his life to preserve his land and the lives of the families who work it? It can only be love.
Courage is finding the will to overcome your fear, nothing more.
Revenge will not bring you peace, only death.
Fear can be expelled with knowledge.
An empty throne provokes more trouble than a weak king.
A king must be a king on his own terms. He cannot be his father. He can only be himself.
To fight, men need a lord who can lead them into battle without fear.
Soon, all of the kings in England shall be kings of nothing.
I do not seek battles. Battles just seem to seek me.
It is not the harp, but the hand that plays it.
Only the gods tell him what to do, and you should beware of men who take their orders from the gods.
Pride makes a man, it drives him, it is the shield wall around his reputation. Men die, they said, but reputation does not die.
Arrows of insight have to be winged by the feathers of speculation.
I have learned that it is one thing to kill in battle, to send a brave man's soul to the corpse hall of the gods, but quite another to take a helpless man's life.
Fear might work on a man, but confidence fights against fear.
A village can be rebuilt. A warrior can die only once.
An army, I learned in time, needs a head. It needs one man to lead it, but give an army two leaders and you halve its strength.
War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumor, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.
To advise a king is a great honor. But it can also be a curse.
Laughter in battle. That was what Ragnar had taught me, to take joy from the fight.
