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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-hulud, Old Father Eternity,” he said. “They say: ‘Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.’”
What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
“What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”
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.
The prescience, he realized, was an illumination that incorporated the limits of what it revealed—at once a source of accuracy and meaningful error. A kind of Heisenberg indeterminacy intervened: the expenditure of energy that revealed what he saw, changed what he saw.
The terrified man fights himself.
The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
And he thought then about the Guild—the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed. They had never dared grasp the sword…and now they could not grasp it.
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.”
“Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.” Fremen Kitab al-Ibar: “The weight of a kindly God is a fearful thing. Did not God give us the burning sun (Al-Lat)? Did not God give us the Mothers of Moisture (Reverend Mothers)? Did not God give us Shaitan (Iblis, Satan)? From Shaitan did we not get the hurtfulness of speed?”
SIRAT: the passage in the O.C. Bible that describes human life as a journey across a narrow bridge (the Sirat) with “Paradise on my right, Hell on my left, and the Angel of Death behind.”
These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness . . . —FROM THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL: MISSIONARIA PROTECTIVA
They who learn the lesson of self-deception too well shall perish by that deception.
“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.”
they were non-thinkers, attaching themselves to any fancied power for the identity which this gave them.
The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist.
‘In doing good, avoid notoriety; in doing evil, avoid self-awareness.’”
The sandy juice of his fears could not be avoided.
