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“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.”
“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.”
Usul.’
A world is supported by four things. …” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “… 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. …” She closed her fingers into a fist. “… without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!”
“If wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets,” he murmured. It was his mother’s expression and he always used it when he felt the blackness of tomorrow on him. Then he thought what an odd expression that was to be taking to a planet that had never known seas or fishes.
“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”
“Those are date palms,” he said. “One date palm requires forty liters of water a day. A man requires but eight liters. A palm, then, equals five men. There are twenty palms out there—one hundred men.”
the proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.
‘They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity of the sand.’ “
“Admirably suited to Harkonnen morality,” the Duke said. Laughter was abrupt and too loud.
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.
“A thing to note about any espionage and/or counter-espionage school is the similar basic reaction pattern of all its graduates. Any enclosed discipline sets its stamp, its pattern, upon its students. That pattern is susceptible to analysis and prediction.”
The Duke gestured sharply down with his right hand, barked:
“There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.” —from “The Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
The uncertain rabbits had to be exposed, made to run for their burrows. Else how could you control them and breed them?
“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 me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
“You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after.
It takes an instant to interpret a known thing when that thing is exposed as something unknown.
The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “span-nungsbogen”—which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing. —from “The Wisdom of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
He’s an honorable man. He wants a sign from me, but he’ll not tip fate by telling me the sign.
Idaho had warned him time and again: “When in doubt of your surface, bare feet are best.”
This was death hanging on an infinite number of miniscule mischances.
“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. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.”
“Keep the mind on the knife and not on the hand that holds it,” Gurney Halleck had told him time and again. “The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand.”
“Killing with the point lacks artistry,” Idaho had once told Paul, “but don’t let that hold your hand when the opening presents itself.”
Now is the terrible moment, she thought. He has killed a man in clear superiority of mind and muscle. He must not grow to enjoy such a victory.
The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
“But we shouldn’t waste sorrow over the aristocracy of misfortune.”
Again, Chani sent the liquid gushing into Jessica’s mouth.
The stuff was dancing particles within her, its motions so rapid that even frozen time could not stop them. Dancing particles.
But Jessica saw that the Reverend Mother didn’t think of herself as old. An image unfolded before the mutual mind’s eye: a young girl with a dancing spirit and tender humor.
Jessica sensed a forced shift in the mutual awareness, saw another mote-presence with the inward eye. The other mote darted wildly here, there, circling. It radiated pure terror.
“I’ve been a long time waiting for you,” she said. “Here is my life.”
“Let them have their orgy,’’ the other-memory said within her. “They’ve little enough pleasure out of living.
There had been Fremen on Poritrin, she saw, a people grown soft with an easy planet, fair game for Imperial raiders to harvest and plant human colonies on Bela Tegeuse and Salusa Secundus.
Far down the corridor, an image-voice screamed: “They denied us the Hajj!”
Bela Tegeuse
And she saw the thread of the past carried by Sayyadina after Sayyadina—first by word of mouth, hidden in the sand chanteys, then refined through their own Reverend Mothers with the discovery of the poison drug on Rossak … and now developed to subtle strength on Arrakis in the discovery of the Water of Life.
I’m like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness—until one day the ability to feel is forced into them.
“You’re the strong one, Chani,”
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.
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 its own fixity. In such
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“The world is a carcass,” the man chanted, his voice wailing across the dunes. “Who can turn away the Angel of Death? What Shai-hulud has decreed must be.”
“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?”
Silence came over the three of them as it was in all the apartments of the sietch, the silence while they remembered and kept their grief thus fresh.
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. —from “Muad’Dib: The Religious Issues” by the Princess Irulan
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. —from “Muad’Dib: The Ninety-nine Wonders of The Universe” by the Princess Irulan
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him. —“The Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
Didn’t you learn the difference between Harkonnen and Atreides so that you could smell a Harkonnen trick by the stink they left on it? Didn’t you learn that Atreides loyalty is bought with love while the Harkonnen coin is hate? Couldn’t you see through to the very nature of this betrayal?”
“The Gurney Halleck I knew was a man adept with both blade and baliset,” Jessica said. “It was the man of the baliset I most admired. Doesn’t that Gurney Halleck remember how I used to enjoy listening by the hour while he played for me? Do you still have a baliset, Gurney?”
