Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.

If you can't be seven feet tall, be seven feet smart.

Some prices are just too high, no matter how much you may want the prize. The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart.

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

I've always thought tests are a gift. And great tests are a great gift. To fail the test is a misfortune. But to refuse the test is to refuse the gift, and something worse, more irrevocable, than misfortune.

Don't wish to be normal. Wish to be yourself. To the hilt. Find out what you're best at, and develop it, and hopscotch your weaknesses. Wish to be great at whatever you are.

Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards.

My home is not a place, it is people.

Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same.

Some people grow into their dreams, instead of out of them.

Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake

Ignorance is not stupidity, but it might as well be. And I do not like feeling stupid.

A weapon is a device for making your enemy change his mind.

Events may be horrible or inescapable. Men have always a choice - if not whether, then how, they may endure.

I am who I choose to be. I have always been what I chose, though not always what I pleased.

When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.

The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers. Prayer is a dangerous business.

Aim high. You may still miss the target, but at least you won't shoot your foot off.

Never do yourself, what you can con professionals into doing for you.

It's a bizarre but wonderful feeling, to arrive dead center of a target you didn't even know you were aiming for.

The world is made by the people who show up for the job.

All the geniuses I ever met were so just part of the time. To qualify, you only have to be great once, you know. Once when it matters.

The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.

The will to be stupid is a very powerful force, but there are always alternatives.

I need words that mean more than they mean, words not just with height and width, but depth and weight and, and other dimensions that I cannot even name.

Growing up, I have discovered over time, is rather like housework: never finished.

We should have taken our chances back then, when we were young and beautiful and didn't even know it.

If you make it plain you like people, it's hard for them to resist liking you back.

One step at a time,” Vorkosigan returned grimly, “I can walk around the world. Watch me.

One step at a time,” Vorkosigan returned grimly, “I can walk around the world. Watch me.

This wasn't prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods. Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.

I've got forward momentum. There's no virtue in it. It's just a balancing act. I don't dare stop.

If the truth doesn't save us, what does that say about us?

When you give each other everything, it becomes an even trade. Each wins all.

Too late, he recalled Miles's dictum that the reward for a job well done was usually a harder job.

The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.

Endure pain, find joy, and make your own meaning, because the universe certainly isn't going to supply it.

Have you ever heard the phrase, Living well is the best revenge?" "Where I come from, someone's head in a bag is generally considered the best revenge

On the sixth day God saw He couldn't do it all, so He created ENGINEERS

Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.

Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.

Miles clutched Quinn's elbow. "Don't Panic." "I'm not panicking," Quinn observed, "I'm watching you panic. It's more entertaining .

I don't want power. I just object to idiots having power over me.

I do think, half of what we call madness is just some poor slob dealing with pain by a strategy that annoys the people around him.

If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.

If you're trying to take a roomful of people by surprise, it's a lot easier to hit your targets if you don't yell going through the door.

The Imperial Service could win a war without coffee, but would prefer not to have to.

Money, power, sex ... and elephants.

Well, what is a blessing but a curse from another point of view?

If power was an illusion, wasn't weakness necessarily one also?