A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
- From "Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
Hope clouds observation.
- Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
Humans must never submit to animals.
- A Recitation from the Bene Gesserit School
The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind. This is the willow's purpose.
- Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
A world is supported by four things... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.
- Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
Motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude towards humanity. It degrades everything it touches.
- Lady Jessica Atreides
The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.
- Margot Lady Fenrig
My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.
- From "Conversations With Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
Command must always look confident. All that faith riding on your shoulders while you sit in the critical seat and never show it.
- Duke Leto Atreides
I must rule with eye and claw - as the hawk among lesser birds.
- Duke Leto Atreides.
Some things beggar likeness.
- Duke Leto Atreides
When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature's wants to direct him to that place.
- Planetologist Pardot Kynes
Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
- From "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
All of man's water, ultimately, belongs to his people - to his tribe.
- Planetologist Pardot Kynes
There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man with human flesh.
- From "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.
- Arrakeen Saying
Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person.
- Bene Gesserit Teaching
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
- From "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here."
- From "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you.
- The Baron Vladimir Harkonnen
The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes.
- Duke Leto Atreides
Mood's a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.
- Gurney Halleck
There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.
- From "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
People are the true strength of a Great House.
- Paul Muad'Dib Atreides
Muad'Dib could indeed see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley. Just so, Muad'Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain. He tells us, that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door." And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe, course, warning "That path leads ever down into stagnation."
- From "Arrakis Awakening" by the Princess Irulan
Law is the ultimate science.
- Sign above the door of the Emperor Shaddam IV
What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
- From "Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
One must always keep the tools of statecraft sharp and ready. Power and fear - sharp and ready.
- Baron Vladimir Harkonnen
At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.
- From "A Child's History of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
The absence of a thing, this can be as deadly as the presence. The absence of air, eh? The absence of water? The absence of anything else we're addicted to.
- Baron Vladimir Harkonnen
One does not risk everything to settle a score prematurely.
- Tuek
Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power.
- Tuek
One enemy at a time.
- Gurney Halleck
The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in the basic source of civilization - agriculture.
- Liet Kynes
No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.
- Planetologist Pardot Kynes
The young reed dies so easily. Beginnings are times of such peril.
- Lady Jessica Atreides
When your opponent fears you, then's the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake.
- Duncan Idaho
Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.
- Bene Gesserit Axiom
The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.
- Pardot Kynes
From water does all life begin.
- Orange Catholic Bible, 467 Kalima
Repression makes a religion flourish.
- Thufir Hawat
When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.
- Bene Gesserit Proverb
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
- From "Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
Prophets have a way of dying by violence.
- Bene Gesserit Saying
The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever.
- Paul Muad'Dib Atreides
Use the first moments in study. You may miss an opportunity for quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurance of success. Take your time and be sure.
- Duncan Idaho
Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.
- From "The Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan
Beyond a critical point within finite space, a freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
- Planetologist Pardot Kynes
Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude toward life. True religions must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you've always known.
- Conclusion, Commentaries on the Orange Catholic Bible
There exists no separation between gods and men: one blends softly casual into the other.
- Proverbs of Muad'Dib
Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray or countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity.
- Tleilaxu Theorem (unproven)
I never wanted to be a god. I wanted only to disappear like a jewel of trace dew caught by the morning. I wanted to escape the angels and the damned - alone ... as though an oversight.
- Paul Muad'Dib Atreides
Fragmentation is the natural destiny of all power.
- Paul Muad'Dib Atreides
To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror; to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.
- Bene Gesserit Saying
Evil can be detected by its smell.
- Paul Muad'Dib Atreides
Truth suffers from too much analysis.
- Ancient Fremen Saying
Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually, they lose touch with reality ... and fall.
- Edric, the Guild Steersman
Some say that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: "See, there He is. He makes us one." Perhaps religion serves the same purpose.
- Scytale, the Face Dancer
To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.
- Hayt, the Ghola
Men always fear things which move by themselves.
- Hayt, the Ghola
The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not ... yet, I occurred.
- Paul Muad'Dib Atreides
One peels a problem like an onion.
- Ancient Saying
You do not beg the sun for mercy.
- "Muad'Dib's Travail," from the Stilgar Commentary
When a creature has developed into one thing, he will choose death rather than change into the opposite.
- Scytale, the Face Dancer
No matter how exotic human civilization has become, no matter the developments of life and society, nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.
- From The Tleilaxu Godbuk
There's but a thin line between many an enemy and many a friend. Where that line stops, there's no beginning and no end.
- Bijaz, the Dwarf
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy."
- Addenda to Orders in Council, The Emperor Paul Muad'Dib
The hearts of all men dwell in the same wilderness.
- Tibana of IV Anbus
Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.
- Leto Atreides II
Anything can be a tool - poverty, war. War is useful because it is effective in so many areas. It stimulates the metabolism. It enforces government. It diffuses genetic strains. It possesses a vitality such as nothing else in the universe. Only those who recognize the value of war and exercise it have any degree of self-determination.
- Bijaz, the Dwarf
One makes a choice between dangers.
- Lady Alia Atreides
Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.
- Ghanima Atreides
One observes the survivors and learns from them.
- Lady Jessica Atreides
When we try to conceal our innermost drives, the entire being screams betrayal.
- Lady Jessica Atreides
You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap. There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.
- Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
Ambitions tend to remain undisturbed by realities.
- The Preacher
People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces.
- A letter to CHOAM, attributed to The Preacher
Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.
- The Apocrypha of Muad'Dib
Humiliation is a thing which no person can forget.
- From The Preacher's Message to the Princess Irulan
You were taught to believe that loyalty buys loyalty. Ohh, Duncan, do not believe in history, because history is impelled by whatever passes for money.
- From The Preacher's Message to Duncan Idaho
Short-term expediency always fails in the long run.
- The Preacher at Arrakeen
It's a subtle and powerful thing, prescience. The future becomes the now. To be sighted in the land of the blind carries its own perils. If you try to interpret what you see for the blind, you tend to forget that the blind possess an inherent movement conditioned by their blindness. They are like a monstrous machine moving along its own path. They have their own momentum, their own fixations. I fear the blind ... I fear them. They can so easily crush anything in their path.
- Leto Atreides II
Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
- Law and Governance, The Spacing Guild Manual
How seductive it is to live in peace.
- Lady Jessica Atreides
This is the fallacy of power: ultimately it is effective only in an absolute, limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power. Muad'Dib taught this lesson to the Sardaukar on the Plains of Arrakeen. His descendants have yet to learn the lesson for themselves.
- The Preacher at Arrakeen
If you put away those who report accurately, you'll keep only those who know what you want to hear. I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections.
- Lady Jessica Atreides
One cannot have a single thing without its opposite.
- Bene Gesserit Axiom
If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you. This is a common error. Even I, your teacher, have made it.
- Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam
Q: The nightingale nests in the plum tree, but what will she do with the wind.
A: Let the nightingale keep to her flowers.
- Ancient Saying
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade the pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class - whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
- Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual
Peace encourages aggression, thus igniting war.
- Bene Gesserit Precept
In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding - symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol - secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub - languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Forces must be ever alert to the formation of sub - languages.
- Lecture to the Arrakeen War College by the Princess Irulan
One learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.
- Farad'n Corrino ( Harq al-Ada)
Run faster. History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps but it's never enough. You must also run.
- Leto Atreides II
Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit - picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma.
- The Mentat Handbook
The one - eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such a problem may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist.
- The Azhar Book; Shamra 1: 4
The wise animal blends into its surroundings.
- Fremen Saying
My mind controls my reality.
- The Beginnings of Prana-Bindu Balance
The spirit of Muad'Dib is more than words, more than the letter of the Law which arises in his name. Muad'Dib must always be that inner outrage against the complacently powerful, against the charlatans and the dogmatic fanatics. It is that inner outrage which must have its say because Muad'Dib taught is one thing above all others: that humans can endure only in a fraternity of social justice.
- The Fedaykin Compact
Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.
- Leto Atreides II
I must not fear. Fear is the mind - killer. Fear is the little - death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
- The Bene Gesserit Litany Against Fear
Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set the pattern. Lonely, finite humans may observe climatic provinces, fluctuations of annual weather and, occasionally may observe such things as "This is a colder year than I've ever known." Such things are sensible. But humans are seldom alerted to the shifting average through a great span of years. And it is precisely in this alerting that humans learn how to survive on any planet. They must learn climate.
- Arrakis, the Transformation After Harq al-Ada
Any path which narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities. The narrowing viewpoint of the maze should appeal only to creatures with their noses buried in sand.
- The Spacing Guild Handbook
The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be."
- Leto Atreides II, Harq al-Ada Biography
Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer.
- Leto Atreides II
"Make no heroes," my father said.
- Voice of Ghanima, from The Oral History
All machines fail or are superseded. Still, the Army worships at the shrine of such things - both fascinated and fearful. ...In its guts, the Army knows it is the Sorcerer's Apprentice. It unleashes technology and never again can the magic be stuffed back into the bottle.
- Leto Atreides II
Technology breeds anarchy. It distributes these tools at random. And with them goes the provocation for violence. The ability to make and use savage destroyers falls inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group is a single individual.
- Leto Atreides II
The ability to view our futures can become a bore...It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
- From an inscription on the storehouse at Dar-es-Balat
Enemies strengthen you. Allies weaken.
- The Stolen Journal
Sheathe the blade. Never remove it without drawing blood.
- Leto Atreides II
Even ordinary tyrants have motives and feelings beyond those usually assigned them by facile historians...History has a way of magnifying some characteristics while it discards others.
- Leto Atreides II
Government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies.
- Leto Atreides II
Beware of the truth...Although much sought after, truth can be dangerous to the seeker. Myths and reassuring lies are much easier to find and believe. If you find a truth, even a temporary one, it can demand that you make painful changes. Conceal your truths within words. Natural ambiguity will protect you then.
- Leto Atreides II
The only past which endures lies wordlessly within you.
- Leto Atreides II
I teach a lesson in responsibility...Membership in a conspiracy, as in an army, frees people from the sense of personal responsibility.
- Leto Atreides II
It is said that there is a principle of conflict which originated with the single cell and gas never deteriorated.
- Reverend Mother Anteac, the Truthsayer
The expectations which history creates for one generation are often shattered in the next generation.
- Voice from the past of Leto Atreides II
Some things do not change very much. They are merely taken from one place and reformed in another place.
- Duncan Idaho
Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: who has the clout?
- Bene Gesserit Council Proceedings: Archives # X0X232
The mind imposes this framework which it calls "reality." That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report.
- Paul Muad'Dib Atreides
Most people are not creatures of reason.
- Leto Atreides II, at the Citadel
Any religion circles like a planet around a sun which it must use for its energy, upon which it depends for its very existence.
- Leto Atreides II
The universe is timeless at its roots and contains therefore all times and all futures.
- Leto Atreides II
Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.
- Leto Atreides II
I will die four deaths - the death of the flesh, the death of the soul, the death of the myth and the death of reason. And all of these deaths contain the seed of resurrection.
- Leto Atreides II
Reputation can be a beautiful weapon. It often spills less blood.
- Basher Miles Teg
The difference beteen a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices...A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors...Good administrators depend on verbal orders. They can never lie about what they've one if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it's too late to make corrections.
- Leto Atreides II
Sometimes, Time rushes by me; sometimes, it creeps.
- Leto Atreides II
The surest sign that an aristocracy exists is the discovery of barriers against change, curtains of iron or stone or of any substance which excludes the new, the different.
- Leto Atreides II
All of us try to evolve, but if something blocks us, we can transfer our potential into pain - seeking it or giving it. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable.
- Moneo Ibn Fuad Al-Lichna Atreides, majordomo to the God Emperor
Thrown sand is a profound gesture. It says: "We share the same burden. Sand is our only enemy. This is what we drink. The hand that holds sand holds no weapon."
- Fremen Axiom
That is the beginning of knowledge - the discovery of something we do not understand.
- Leto Atreides II
The fire never completely goes out.
- Leto Atreides II
All words are plastic. Word images begin to distort in the instant of utterance. Ideas embedded in a language require that particular language for expression. This is the very essence of the meaning within the word exotic. See how it begins to distort? Translation squirms in the presence of the exotic...Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate to the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change.
- The Stolen Journals
All people have intentions.
- Leto Atreides II
The three legs of the agreement-tripod are desire, data and doubt. Accuracy and honesty have little to do with it...desire brings the participants together. Data sets the limits of their dialogue. Doubt frames the questions.
- Leto Atreides II
Argument closes off the doors of the senses...It always masks violence. Continued too long, argument always leads to violence.
- Leto Atreides II
Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. you deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the little children to breathe slowly. You tame.
- The Stolen Journals
How tempting it is to raise high walls and keep out change. Rot here in our own self-satisfied comfort. Enclosures of any kind are a fertile breeding ground for hatred of outsiders. That produces a bitter harvest.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
When a thing vanishes, that is as much of a message as when a thing suddenly appears. The empty spaces are always worthy of our study.
- Leto Atreides II
If I choose the good, does that make me good?
- Leto Atreides II
If you live in bad faith, lies will appear to you like the truth.
- Leto Atreides II
You don't know what it is to love. What have you ever given?
- Leto Atreides II
It's not knowing that conjures up the greatest terrors.
- Darwi Odrade
Mobility is the key to military success. If you're tied down in forts, even whole-planet forts, you are ultimately vulnerable.
- Basher Miles Teg
When logic fails, another tool must be used.
- Honored Matres Axiom
I warn you that ignorance thrives on hysteria...The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria. The Atreides art is the art of ruling without hysteria, the art of being responsible for the uses of power.
- Moneo Ibn Fuad al-Lichna Atreides, Majordomo to the God Emperor
Rot at the core spreads outward.
- The Tleilaxu Mahai, Tylwyth Waff, Master of the Masters
In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history. Show me someone who says, "Something must be done!" and I will show you a head full of vicious intentions that have no other outlet. What we must strive for always is to find the natural flow and go with it.
- Reverend Mother Taraza, Conversational Record, BG File GSXXMAT9
If we cannot adjust our differences peacefully we are less than human.
- Mentat Precept
Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.
- Chenoeh: "Conversations with Leto II"
Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more that a kind of dumb persistence, and they resort with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.
- Reverend Mother Superior Alma Mavis Taraza
Remember your philosopher's doubts...Beware! The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.
- Reverend Mother Superior Alma Mavis Taraza
The unclouded eye is better, no matter what it sees.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Nothing surpasses the complexity of the human mind.
- Leto II: Dar-es-Balat Records
Tone of voice and attitude alone can subjugate another's will.
- Duncan Idaho
One of the most dangerous things in the universe is an ignorant people with real grievances. That is nowhere near as dangerous, however, as an informed and intelligent society with grievances. The damage that vengeful intelligence can wreak, you cannot even imagine.
- Basher Miles Teg
I always prepare secondary ways of dealing with problems.
- Basher Burzmali
Survival! That's all the noble purpose we need. Survival!
- Reverend Mother Superior Alma Mavis Taraza
Man is but a pebble dropped in a pool.
- Tleilaxu Belief
It is your fate, forgetfulness. All of the old lessons of life, you lose and gain and lose and gain again.
- Leto II, the Voice of Dar-es-Balat
No planet, no land or sea, no part of any land or sea is here forever. Wherever we stand, we are only stewards.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening - first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hindlegs, and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: "It is obvious! The nose causes the tail."
- Stories of the Hidden Wisdom, from the Oral History of Rakis
Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.
- Leto II, His Voice, from Dar-es-Balat
Never believe that you have plumbed the depths of any place...or of any human.
- Reverend Mother Superior Alma Mavis Taraza
Complexity hides within complexity. Great deeds and foul ones have been done at the goading of sexual forces.
- Reverend Mother Superior Alma Mavis Taraza
You may think of this only as sexuality but we prefer the more basic term: procreation. It has many facets and offshoots and it has apparently unlimited energy. The emotion called "love" is only one small aspect...This energy must have an outlet. Bottle it up and it becomes monstrously dangerous. Redirect it and it will sweep over anything in its path. This is an ultimate secret of all religions.
- Bene Gesserit Teaching
Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all the legal professions of history have based their job security.
- Bene Gesserit Coda
I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, conditions they call peace. Even as they spread, they create seeds of turmoil and violence.
- Leto II, the God Emperor
Humans have this deep desire to classify, to apply labels to everything...We lay claim to what we name. We assume an ownership that can be misleading and dangerous.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
You cannot know history unless you know how leaders move with its currents. Every leader requires outsiders to perpetuate his leadership.
- Leto II (The Tyrant), from the Vether Bebe Translation
If I am to die, I must pass along a transcendental lesson. I must leave with serenity.
- Reverend Mother Lucilla
Always beware of those who fawn upon us, nuzzling up to all of that power we're supposed to have. How flattering to find great mobs of servants waiting and anxious to do our bidding! How utterly debilitating.
- Reverend Mother Lucilla
You cannot manipulate a marionette with only one string.
- The Zensunni Whip
Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.
- Darwi Odrade
We trundle along on borrowed days.
- Reverend Mother Sheeana
There is nothing humans hate more than the unpredictable.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Whose truth? Modified in what way? In what context?
- Bene Gesserit View, said to be Zensunni
Names carry magic.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
What glue had actually held the Old Empire together? Many things, some small and some large, but mostly economic. Lines of connection thought of often as conveniences. And what kept them from blasting one another out of existence? The Great Convention. "You blast anyone and we blast you."
- Scytale, the Face Dancer
Trust no government!
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerance will true nature be seen.
- The Amtal Rule
Oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Never damage your own nest.
- Reverend Mother Dortujla
All states are abstractions.
- Octun Politicus, BG Archives
The greatest relevancy can become irrelevant in the space of a heartbeat. Mentats should look upon such moments with joy.
- Mentat Teaching
Some precious stones can be identified by their impurities. Experts map impurities within the stones. A secret fingerprint. People are like that. You often know them by their defects. The glittering surface tells you too little. Good identification requires you to look deep inside and see the impurities. There is the gem quality of a total being. What would Van Gogh have been without impurities?
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
The difference between sentiment and sentimentality is easy to see. When you avoid killing somebody's pet on the glazeway, that's sentiment. If you swerve to avoid the pet and that causes you to kill pedestrians, that is sentimentality.
- Mentat Teaching
Moral decisions are always easy to recognize. They are where you abandon self-interest.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake.
- Bene Gesserit Commentary
The true warrior often understands his enemy better than he understands his friends. A dangerous pitfall if you let understanding lead to sympathy as it will naturally when left unguided.
- Basher Miles Teg
Humans can balance on strange surfaces. Even on unpredictable ones. It's called "getting in tune." Great musicians know it. Surfers I watched when I was a child on Gammu, they knew it. Some waves throw you but you're prepared for that. You climb back up and go at it once more.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Never follow a leader without asking your own questions.
- Bene Gesserit Axiom
Uproot your questions from their ground the dangling roots will be seen. More questions!
- Mentat Zensufi
Power attracts the psychotics. Always. That's what we have to avoid within ourselves.
- Leto Atreides II
Try to hold on to youth and it mocks you while it sprints away.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Beware jargon. It usually hides ignorance and carries little knowledge.
- The Coda
We live in our little congeries like anyone else. Rooms of the mind, rooms of the body.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Creative anarchy is the path to survival in this universe.
- Ixian Philosophy
Look for the ones who can say "Yes." Never bother with underlings who can only say "No."
- Ancient Bene Gesserit Insight
Chaos exists as raw material from which to create order.
- Reverend Mother Superior Darwi Odrade
Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.
- The Zensunni Whip
Today is sufficient unto today.
- Reverend Mother Murbella
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.
- The Coda
