Chapterhouse: Dune (Dune, #6)

by Frank Herbert

“How tempting it is to raise high walls and keep out change. Rot here in our own self-satisfied comfort.”

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.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

Memory should bring wisdom but it does not. It is how we order the memory and where we apply our knowledge.”

seek the questions that form the best images. Doing this, you never thought of yourself as clever, that you had the formula to provide the solution. You remained as responsive to new questions as you did to new patterns.

“Everything you do, everything you sense and say is experiment. No deduction final. Nothing stops until dead and perhaps not even then, because each life creates endless ripples. Induction bounces within and you sensitize yourself to it. Deduction conveys illusions of absolutes. Kick the truth and shatter it!”

“Show me a completely smooth operation and I’ll show you someone who’s covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”