Mistborn: The Alloy of Law

Key Takeaways

• Importance vs. vitality. “The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.” Prioritizing the vital over the merely important is a form of judgment most people lack.
• Good and evil by inertia, not choice. “People today … it seems they are good, or sometimes evil, mostly by inertia, not by choice. They act as their surroundings prepare them to act.” Character is less determined by deliberate decision than by environment and default momentum.
• Trust is the foundation of relationships. Removing trust from a relationship — through contracts, surveillance, or distance — removes its point. “If you remove the foundation of trust from a relationship, then what is the point of that relationship?”
• The Path: simplest viable religion. One tenet — “Do more good than harm” — and a mandate to study three hundred other religions’ moral codes. The practice is the worship; no elaborate theology required.
• Lawkeeping and philosophy share the same root. Both are about questions: capturing the uncatchable, solving the puzzles of the human mind and the universe. The two riddles of time.

Connections

• Trust — the central claim that eliminating trust from a relationship eliminates the relationship itself maps directly to the Trust concept.
• Brandon Sanderson — first of the Wax and Wayne era books, set three hundred years after the original Mistborn trilogy.
• Cosmere — the fourth Mistborn novel, set in the same shared Cosmere universe as the original trilogy but in an industrializing era.

Highlights

• “The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.”
• “That hat looks ridiculous.” “Fortunately, I can change hats,” Wayne said, “while you, sir, are stuck with that face.”
• “I really am impressed that you have been shot so often. Really.” “Getting hit’s not really that impressive,” Wayne noted. “It don’t take much skill to get shot. It’s avoiding the bullets that’s tough.”
• “Once one becomes a man, he can and must make his own decisions. But I do offer warning. Even a good thing can become destructive if taken to excess.”
• “The measure of a person is not how much they have lived. It’s in how they make use of what life has shown them.”
• “Well, perhaps by one definition. But it seems that either one—good or evil—has to be pursued for it to be significant. People today … it seems they are good, or sometimes evil, mostly by inertia, not by choice. They act as their surroundings prepare them to act.”
• “To be of use in even a single burst of flame and sound is worth more than a lifetime of achieving nothing.”
• “Some mistakes, though, you can’t fix by being sorry. Can’t fix them, no matter what you do.”
• “Why is it,” Marasi said angrily, “that small-minded men must destroy that which they know is better, and greater, than they?”
• “Too much in high society is built around the idea of making certain you don’t need to trust anyone,” Waxillium said. “Contracts, detailed operating reports, not being seen alone with an eligible member of the opposite gender. If you remove the foundation of trust from a relationship, then what is the point of that relationship?”
• “The more alone you are,” Waxillium said softly, “the more important it is to have someone you can rely upon.”
• “Harmony protect us from small-minded men with too much power.”
• “Steris had called the Path a simple religion. Perhaps it was. There was only one basic tenet: Do more good than harm. There were other aspects—the belief that all truth was important, the requirement to give more than one took. There were over three hundred examples listed in the Words of Founding, religions that could have been. Might have been. In other times, in another world. The Path was to study them, learn from their moral codes. A few rules were central. Do not seek lust without commitment. See the strengths in all flaws. Pray and meditate fifteen minutes a day. And don’t waste time worshipping Harmony. Doing good was the worship.”
• “Did people see how their voices were like living things? Move a plant, and it would change and adapt to the environment around it. Move a person, and the way they talked would grow, adapt, evolve.”
• “There is a link between being a lawman and a philosopher,” Waxillium said, smiling idly. “Lawkeeping and philosophy are both about questions. I was drawn to law by a need to find the answers nobody else could, to capture the men everyone considered uncatchable. Philosophy is similar. Questions, secrets, puzzles. The human mind and the nature of the universe—the two great riddles of time.”
• “All of the best motives boiled down to a single, driving emotion.” #Motivation