Dune

The more I study the phenomenon of human creativity, the more mysterious it seems. Their whole process of innovation is elusive, but is critical for us to understand. If we fail in this endeavor, thinking machines are doomed.

The future, the past and the present are intertwined, a weave that forms any point in time.

Science, under the guise of benefiting mankind, is a dangerous force that often tampers with natural processes, without recognizing the consequences. Under such a scenario, mass destruction is inevitable.

One can compare this new Jihad to a necessary editing process. We are disposing of the things that are destroying us as humans.

Where one person sees cause of rejoicing, another sees only reason for despair. Pray that you are the former.

Science: the creation of dilemmas by the solutions of mysteries.

For all their computerized precision, thinking machines can be confused in many different ways.

In order to understand the meaning of victory, you must first define your enemies...and your allies.

Invention is an art form.

With all the artillery, ships and manpower in the military, our commanders often forget that ideas can be the greatest weapon of all.

Only those with narrow minds fail to see that the definition of impossible is "Lack of imagination and incentive."

The gravest error a thinking person can make is to believe that one particular version of history is absolute fact. History is recorded by a series of observers, none of whom is impartial. The facts are distorted by sheer passage of time and — especially in the case of the Butlerian Jihad — thousands of years of humanity's dark ages, deliberate misrepresentations by religious sects, and the inevitable corruption that comes from an accumulation of careless mistakes. The wise person, then, views history as a set of lessons to be learned, choices and ramifications to be considered and discussed, and mistakes that should never again be made.

He who strikes fastest strikes twice.

Unfortunately, some wars are won by the side that is the most fanatical in a religious sense. The victorious leaders harness the holy energy of collective insanity.

It is better to be envied than pitied.

Do not count what you have lost. Count only what you still have.

Select your battles carefully. Ultimately, victory and defeat are a matter of your own careful — or reckless — choices.

Home can be anywhere, for it is a part of one's self.

It has often been said that it is better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven. This is defeatist talk: I intend to rule everywhere, not just in Hell.

Secrets give birth to more secrets.

Sand keeps the skin clean, and the mind.

Peering back through the magnifying glass of time, men and women in the future view the personalities of the Great Revolt as larger-than-life. Such an impression comes not through any distortion of the glass, nor from a process of embellishment that generates mythology. Instead, the heroes of the Jihad were much as they are now remembered; they rose to the occasion when humanity needed them more then ever before.

Here is where the analytical power of the thinking machines fails them: they believe they have no weaknesses.

Those who refuse to fight against thinking machines are traitors to the human race. Those who do not use every possible weapon are fools.

Endurance. Belief. Patience. Hope. These are the key words of our existence.

Everything in the universe contains flaws, ourselves included. Even God does not attempt perfection in His creations. Only humankind has such foolish arrogance.

A human lifespan is not always sufficient for a person to achieve greatness. To counter this, some of us have seized more time for ourselves.

There is no such thing as the future. Humankind faces multiple possible futures, many of which hinge on seemingly inconsequential events.

In truth, is it better to remember or to forget? We must balance this decision between our history and our humanity.

Thoughts become weapons. Philosophies are distinct reasons for war. Good intentions are the most destructive arsenal of all.

The weakness of thinking machines is that they actually believe all the information they receive, and react accordingly.

Even victories take their toll on a man.

A tool wielded in ignorance can become the most dangerous of weapons.

We are fools to think the battle is ever over. A defeated foe can delude us into letting down our guard... to our eternal sorrow.

The coward will not fight. The fool refuses to see necessity. The scoundrel puts himself ahead of humanity. The Zenshiites are all these things.

When others place impossible expectations on a man, he must redefine his goals, and forge his own path. That way at least someone is satisfied.

There is a certain momentum to victory...and to defeat.

In the desert, the line between life and death is sharp and quick.

The army fosters technology, and technology breeds anarchy because it distributes the terrible machines of destruction. Even before this Jihad, one man alone could create and apply enough violence to ravage an entire planet. It happened! Why do you think the computer became anathema?

Science: lost in its own mythos, redoubling its efforts when it's forgotten it's aim.

Brutality breeds brutality. Love breeds love.

There are a million ways to ask the same question, and a million ways to answer it.

Good intentions can bring about as much destruction as an evil conqueror. Either way, the result is the same.

Human beings can always improve themselves. This is one of the advantages they have over thinking machines... until I find the way to mimic all of their senses. And sensibilities.

War: A manufactory that produces desolation, death, and secrets.

Like many culinary delicacies, revenge is a dish best savored slowly, after long and delicate preparation.

The Fremen have a saying: every faintly evil thought must be put aside immediately before it takes root.

Anger is one thing, violence another.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!

Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life. Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay form organism to organism.

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.

An Emperor's slightest dislike is transmitted to those who serve him, and there it is amplified into rage.

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains it own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.

To produce the genetic alteration of an organism, place it in an environment which is dangerous but not lethal.

It was a time of sorceresses whose powers were real. The measure of them is seen in the fact they never boasted how they grasped the firebrand.

There were other far more important indications that they virtually ignored: As a youth, Paul Atreides showed ability to predict the future. He was known to have had prescient visions that were accurate, penetrating, and defied four-dimensional explanation. The Reverend Mother who tested Paul's humanity when he was fifteen, deposes that he surmounted more agony in the test than any other human of record. Yet she failed to make special note of this in her report!... When the Arrakis Affair boiled up, the Spacing Guild hinted that its navigators saw a nexus...beyond which the path was hidden from the prescient eye. This was a clear indication that some agency was interfering with higher order dimensions.

Stilgar squared his shoulders, stepped closer to Paul and lowered his voice. "Now, remember what I told you. Do it simply and directly — nothing fancy…You don't have to impress anyone with your courage. We know you are brave. All you must do is call the maker and ride him."

You cannot back into the future.

God created Arrakis to train the faithful.

In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it.

The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever.

"Control the coinage and the courts — let the rabble have the rest." Thus the Padishah Emperor advises you. And he tells you; "If you want profits, you must rule." There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: "Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?"

Here follows an excerpt from the Summa prepared by her own agents at the request of the Lady Jessica immediately after the Arrakis Affair. The candor of this report amplifies its value far beyond the ordinary.

Because the Bene Gesserit operated for centuries behind the blind of a semi-mystic school while carrying on their selective breeding program among humans, we tend to award them with more status than they appear to deserve. Analysis of their "trial of fact" on the Arrakis Affair betrays the school's profound ignorance of its own role.

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans 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.

It's easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.

My mother obeyed her Sister Superiors where the Lady Jessica disobeyed. Which of them was the stronger? History already has answered.

Everything around him moved smoothly in the ancient routine that required no orders.

"Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him…once…long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject."

The Fremen knew this rule instinctively.

“We shouldn’t have tried to create new symbols,” he said. We should've realized we weren't supposed to introduce uncertainties into accepted belief, that we weren't supposed to stir up curiosity about God. We are daily confronted by the terrifying instability of all things human, yet we permit our religions to grow more rigid and controlled, more conforming and oppressive. What is this shadow across the highway of Divine Command? It is a warning that institutions endure, that symbols endure when their meaning is lost, that there is no summa of all attainable knowledge.

Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, "I am not the kind of person I want to be." It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.

Riots and comedy are but symptoms of the times, profoundly revealing. They betray the psychological tone, the deep uncertainties... And the striving for something better, plus the fear that nothing would come of it all.

When law and religious duty are one, your selfdom encloses the Universe.

Any training school for free citizens must begin by teaching distrust, not trust. It must teach questioning, not acceptance of stock answers.

The vision made him want to freeze into immobility, but this, too, was action with its consequences.

The Prophet's mother carried gene-markers whose supreme importance to the breeding program was known for almost two thousand years. She was a Bene Gesserit bred and trained, and should have been a willing tool of the project...Instead, for reasons she confesses have never been completely clear to her, the concubine Lady Jessica defied her orders and bore a son.

This alone should have alerted the Bene Gesserit to the possibility that a wild variable had entered their scheme.

There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it's almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed. ... These things are so ancient within us that they're ground into each separate cell of our bodies. We're shaped by such forces. You can say to yourself, 'Yes, I see how such a thing may be.' But when you look inward and confront the raw force of your own life unshielded, you see your peril. You see that this could overwhelm you. The greatest peril to the Giver is the force that takes. The greatest peril to the Taker is the force that gives. It's as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking. (And you, my son, are you one who gives or one who takes? I'm the fulcrum. I cannot give without taking and I cannot take without...)

Facts mean nothing when they are preempted by appearance. Do not underestimate the power of impression over reality.

To save one from a mistake is a gift of paradise.

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.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" — which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man. There is no measuring Muad'Dib's motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad'Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies' skins, the Muad'Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: "I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough."

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

It is no secret that we all have secrets. However, few of them are as veiled as we intend them to be.

The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.

May thy knife chip and shatter.

Discovery is dangerous... but so is life. A man unwilling to take risk is doomed never to learn, never to grow, never to live.

The natural destiny of power is fragmentation.

Men, finding no answers to the sunnah [the ten thousand religious questions from the Shari-ah] now apply their own reasoning. All men seek to be enlightened. Religion is but the most ancient and honorable way in which men have striven to make sense out of God's universe. Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.

She focused on the psychokinesthetic extension of herself, looking within, and was confronted immediately with a cellular core, a pit of blackness from which she recoiled. That is the place where we cannot look, she thought. There is the place the Reverend Mothers are so reluctant to mention — the place where only a Kwisatz Haderach may look.

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes 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.

It occurred to Paul then that he had seen his own dead body along countless reaches of the time web, but never once had he seen his moment of death.

Expect only what happens in the fight. That way you'll never be surprised.

The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realize about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams the flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

To accept a little death is worse than death itself.

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

One of the most terrible moments in a boy's life ... is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It's a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can't evade it.

Things persisted in not being what they seemed.

Life — all life — is in the service of life

You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training, educating and disciplining of the orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic.

Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion 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.

Paul sensed his own tensions, decided to practice one of the mind-body lessons his mother had taught him. Three quick breaths triggered the responses: he fell into the floating awareness...focusing the consciousness...aortal dilation...avoiding the unfocused mechanism of consciousness...to be conscious by choice...blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions...one does not obtain food-safety-freedom by instinct alone...animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct...the animal destroys and does not produce...animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual...the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe...focused consciousness by choice, this forms your grid...bodily integrity follows nerve-blood flow according to the deepest awareness of cell needs...all things/cells/beings are impermanent...strive for flow-permanence within...

You well know the weakness there! Shield your son too much, Jessica, and he'll not grow strong enough to fulfill any destiny.

"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."

We are generalists. You can't draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.

Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

"Your mother wanted me to be the one to tell you, Son. You see, you may have Mentat capabilities."

Paul stared at his father, unable to speak for a moment, then: "A Mentat? Me? But I…"

"Hawat agrees, Son. It's true."

"But I thought Mentat training had to start during infancy and the subject couldn't be told because it might inhibit the early…" He broke off, all his past circumstances coming to focus in one flashing computation. "I see," he said.

Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.

The mind can go either direction under stress — toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.

There is no escape — we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

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. Make that the science of your tradition!

When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature's wants to direct him to that place.

He shall know your ways as if born to them.

Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it's a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that's really chewing on us.

There is probably no more terrible instance of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man — with human flesh.

Hope clouds observation.

"We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. The Guild, so we think, emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs another function."

"Politics," he said.

"Kull wahad!" the old woman said. She sent a hard glance at Jessica.

"I've not told him. Your Reverence," Jessica said.

The Reverend Mother returned her attention to Paul. "You did that on remarkably few clues," she said.

Let us not rail about justice as long as we have arms and the freedom to use them.

In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never persistent. 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.

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

Do you wrestle with dreams?

Do you contend with shadows?

Do you move in a kind of sleep?

Time has slipped away.

Your life is stolen.

You tarried with trifles.

Victim of your folly.

What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack. Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!

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."

O you who know what we suffer here, do not forget us in your prayers.

If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. "Something cannot emerge from nothing," he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable "the truth" can be.

Cool your sorrow — we've the diversions for it; three things there are that ease the heart — water, green grass, and the beauty of woman.

Mood? What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises — no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.

I must rule with eye and claw — as the hawk among lesser birds.

Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Bless the Maker and all His Water. Bless the coming and going of Him, May His passing cleanse the world. May He keep the world for his people.

Is it defeatist or treacherous for a doctor to diagnose a disease correctly? My only intention is to cure the disease.

There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind — we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge.

In the week before their departure to Arrakis, when all the final scurrying about had reached a nearly unbearable frenzy, an old crone came to visit the mother of the boy, Paul. It was a warm night at Castle Caladan, and the ancient pile of stone that had served the Atreides family as home for twenty-six generations bore that cooled-sweat feeling it acquired before a change in the weather.

"The drug's dangerous," she said, "but it gives insight. When a Truthsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory — in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past...but only feminine avenues." Her voice took on a note of sadness. "Yet, there's a place where no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot — into both feminine and masculine pasts."

"Your Kwisatz Haderach?"

"Yes, the one who can be many places at once: the Kwisatz Haderach. Many men have tried the drug . . . so many, but none has succeeded."

"They tried and failed, all of them?"

"Oh, no." She shook her head. "They tried and died."

That which submits rules....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.

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

All the special training from Hawat and his mother — the mnemonics, the focusing of awareness, the muscle control and sharpening of sensitivities, the study of languages and nuances of voices — all of it clicked into a new kind of understanding in his mind.

"You'll be the Duke someday, Son," his father said. "A Mentat Duke would be formidable indeed."

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.

A million deaths were not enough for Yueh!

Prophecy and prescience — How can they be put to the test in the face of the unanswered questions? Consider: How much is actual prediction of the "wave form" (as Muad'Dib referred to his vision-image) and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy? What of the harmonics inherent in the act of prophecy? Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife?

The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

One thought remained to him. Leto saw it in formless light on rays of black: The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. The thought struck him with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain.

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.

Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.

Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.

A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fools wrath is heavier than them both.

The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.

To attempt an understanding of Muad'Dib without understanding his mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be.

You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard for those who come after. The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record. We have the record in front of us and our course is clear.

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it’s complete because it’s ended here."

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. This every sister of the Bene Gesserit knows. To begin your study of the life of Muad'Dib, then take care that you first place him in his time: born in the 57th year of the Padishah Emperor, Shaddam IV. And take the most special care that you locate Muad'Dib in his place: the planet Arrakis. Do not be deceived by the fact that he was born on Caladan and lived his first fifteen years there. Arrakis, the planet known as Dune, is forever his place.