Dune 2 Quotes

Truth suffers from too much analysis. -Ancient Fremen Saying

If you need something to worship, then worship life - all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual. -Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.

Here lies a toppled god. His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, A narrow and a tall one.

They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

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.

The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice.

Reason is the first victim of strong emotion," Scytale murmured.

We have eternity, beloved." "You may have eternity. I have only now." "But this is eternity.

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly.

You do not beg the sun for mercy. -Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary

It was mostly sweet," he whispered, "and you were the sweetest of all.

Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.

Some lies are easier to believe than the truth.

The wise man molds himself—the fool lives only to die.

I don't speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.

How easy it was to mistake clear reasoning for correct reasoning!

A creature who has spent his life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation

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.

There was a man so wise, He jumped into A sandy place And burnt out both his eyes! And when he knew his eyes were gone, He offered no complaint. He summoned up a vision And made himself a saint. -Children's Verse from History of Muad'dib

I didn't want to be different. I wanted to be able to laugh But I'm sister to an Emperor who's worshiped as a god. People fear me. I never wanted to be feared. I don't want to be part of history, I just want to be loved . . . and to love.

And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold . . . not bought, but sold.

What the eyes had seen could not be erased.

Wild Fremen said it well: "Four things cannot be hidden -- love, smoke, a pillar of fire and a man striding across the open bled.

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?

Some say," Scytale said, "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, m'Lord.

The abyss remains. It is pregnant with all the things yet to be. Ah, what gentle violence!

To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.

There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences.

There are problems in this universe for which there are no answers. Nothing. Nothing can be done.

Ideas are most to feared when they become actions," Paul said.

How will I be remembered by my children? This is the true measure of a man.

You can't build politics on love," he said. "People aren't concerned with love; it's too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos.

I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.

As soon as she releases me, Galen grabs my hand and I don't even have time to gasp before he snatches me to the surface and pulls me toward shore, only pausing to dislodge his pair of swimming trunks from under his favorite rock, where he had just moments before taken the time to hide them. I know the routine and turn away so he can change, but it seems like no time before he hauls me onto the beach and drags me to the sand dunes in front of my house. "What are you doing?" I ask. His legs are longer than mine so for every two of his strides I have to take three, which feels a lot like running. He stops us in between the dunes. "I'm doing something that is none of anyone else's business." Then he jerks me up against him and crushes his mouth on mine. And I see why he didn't want an audience for this kiss. I wouldn't want an audience for this kiss, either, especially if the audience included my mother. This is our first kiss after he announced that he wanted me for his mate. This kiss holds promises of things to come. When he pulls away I feel drunk and excited and nervous and filled with a craving that I'm not sure can ever be satisfied. And Galen looks startled. "Maybe I shouldn't have done that," he says. "That makes it about fifty times harder to leave, I think.

We will not run," Paul said. "We'll move with dignity. We'll do what must be done.

I have said: "Blow out the lamp! Day is here!" And you keep saying: "Give me a lamp so I can find the day.

Power tends to isolate those who hold too much of it. Eventually they lose touch with reality… and fall.

Growing older is to grow more wicked.

Can you collect chaos? Not collecting, that is the ultimate gathering. What can you gather without gathering yourself.

What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.

Just repeating a statement often and with great vehemence does not make it a fact, and no amount of repetition can make a rational person believe it.

Who is truly anyone? Every person is illusion to some degree.

You do not take from this universe, he thought. It grants what it will.

Among my father’s most important messages were that governments lie to protect themselves and they make incredibly stupid decisions. Years after the publication of Dune, Richard M. Nixon provided ample proof. Dad said that Nixon did the American people an immense favor in his attempt to cover up the Watergate misdeeds. By amplified example, albeit unwittingly, the thirty-seventh president of the United States taught people to question their leaders. In interviews and impassioned speeches on university campuses all across the country, Frank Herbert warned young people not to trust government, telling them that the American founding fathers had understood this and had attempted to establish safeguards in the Constitution.

People want order, this kind or some other. They sit in the prison of their hungers and see that war has become the sport of the rich. That's a dangerous form of sophistication. It's disorderly.

The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved. They can only be outgrown.

Never underestimate the power of the human mind to believe what it wants to believe, no matter the conflicting evidence.

Look inside yourself and you can see the universe.

Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything.

They’re trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

Flesh that had cried in ecstasy, eyes that had burned him with their desire, the voice that had charmed him because it played no tricks of subtle control—all gone, back into the water and the sand.

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

One moment of incompetence can be fatal.

You cannot fix your gaze upon it! Senses cannot record it. No words describe it." -Alia

To see eternity was to be exposed to eternity’s whims, oppressed by endless dimensions.

No person can ever know everything that is in the heart of another. We are all Face Dancers in our souls.

Let the future remain uncertain, for that is the canvas to receive our desires.

For them, 'mektub al mellah', as the Fremen say." "The thing was written with salt," Irulan translated.

Once more the drama begins.' — The Emperor Paul Muad'dib on his ascension to the Lion Throne.

As with all priests, you learned early to call the truth heresy.

The Zensunni approach to birth," he said, urging her even faster, "is to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension. Do not compete with what is happening. To compete is to prepare for failure. Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything.

You can’t stop a mental epidemic. It leaps from person to person across parsecs. It’s overwhelmingly contagious. It strikes at the unprotected side, in the place where we lodge the fragments of other such plagues. Who can stop such a thing? Muad’dib hasn’t the antidote. The thing has roots in chaos. Can orders reach there?

How strange that so few people ever looked up from the spice long enough to wonder at the near-ideal nitrogen-oxygen-CO2 balance being maintained here in the absence of large areas of plant cover.

Every hammer has the innate capacity to strike a nail. Every human mind has the innate capacity for greatness. But not every hammer is properly used, nor is every human mind.

The universe is our picture. Only the immature imagine the cosmos to be what they think it is.

If you surrender, you have already lost. If you refuse to give up, though, no matter the odds against you, at least you have succeeded in trying.

To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.

Every religious, business and governmental question has the single derivative: 'Who will exercise the power?' Alliances, combines, complexes, they all chase mirages unless they go for the power. All else is nonsense, as most thinking beings come to realize.

The expectations of civilized society should afford all the protection a person needs. But that armor is rendered as thin as a tissue when one is dealing with the uncivilized. -Bene Gesserit Archives

By the time we reach the stretch of dunes that lead to Nur, the moon is high, the galaxy a blaze of silver above. But we are all exhausted from fighting the wind. Izzi’s walk has deteriorated to a stumble, and both Keenan and I pant in tiredness. Even Elias struggles, stopping short enough times that I begin to worry for him. “I

Freedom is an elusive concept. Some men hold themselves prisoner even when they have the power to do as they please and go where they choose, while others are free in their hearts, even as shackles restrain them.

The premise of Ezequiel Morsella’s PRISM model7,8 is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict—the impulse to withdraw one’s hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you’ll die if you act on that impulse—was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atreides qualified as “Human” during their gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert’s Dune.)

We walked into the forever white sand dunes, and soon we were far away from all the people in the world. Everyone had disappeared from the universe except the young man whose hand I was holding, and everything that had ever been born and everything that had ever died existed where his hand touched mine. Everything the blue of the sky, the rain in the clouds, the white of the sand, the water in the oceans, all the languages of all the nations, and all the broken hearts that had learned to beat in their brokenness. We didn't talk. This was the quietest moment I had ever been in. Even my busy brain--it was quiet. So quiet that I felt that I was in a church. And the thought entered my head that my love for Dante was holy, not because I was holy but because what I felt for him was pure.

Le rythme d'une phrase et sa continuité avec ce qui la précède sont aussi important que son contenu.

Les mots veuf et veuve n'existent pas en langue faëlle. Pourquoi nommer un être qui ne survit pas plus d'une semaine ?

No one has yet determined the power of the human species . . . what it may perform by instinct, and what it may accomplish with rational determination.

There is no reality -- only our own order imposed on everything.

Deceit is a tool of statecraft," Irulan agreed. "There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover," Paul said.

She did not want conversation or company, just the presence of other people; she hoped the background drone of their lives would fill the empty spaces in her mind.

Even victories take their toll on a man.

There are some things no one can bear. I meddled in all the possible futures I could create until, finally, they created me.

Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than heresy.

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, 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.

The Universe operates on a basic principle of economics: everything has its cost. We pay to create our future, we pay for the mistakes of the past. We pay for every change we make . . . and we pay just as dearly if we refuse to change.

Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power . . . all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is "Thou shalt not question!" But we do anyway. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind's deepest sense of creativity.

It is said that there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe -- that nothing remains in its original state, that each day, each hour, each moment, there is change.

Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.

This myth he'd made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs - what had it come to at last? When the waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining with infinite grains of memory and little else.

I succumbed to the lure of the oracle, he thought. And he sensed that succumbing to this lure might be to fix himself upon a single-track life. Could it be, he wondered, that the oracle didn't tell the future? Could it be that the oracle made the future?

We create our own future by our own beliefs, which control our actions. A strong enough belief system, a sufficiently powerful conviction, can make anything happen. This is how we create our consensus reality, including our gods.

Absolute rules are for unthinking people. Sheep require fences—humans do not.

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, 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

Once . . . long ago, he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.

Aussi, préférant mille fois la mort à une arrestation, j'accomplissais des choses étonnantes, et qui, plus d'une fois, me donnèrent cette preuve que le trop grand soin que nous prenons de notre corps est à peu près le seul obstacle à la réussite de ceux de nos projets qui ont besoin d'une décision rapide et d'une exécution vigoureuse et déterminée. En effet, une fois qu'on a fait le sacrifice de sa vie, on n'est plus l'égal des autres hommes, ou plutôt les autres hommes ne sont plus vos égaux, et quiconque a pris cette résolution sent, à l'instant même, décupler ses forces et s'agrandir son horizon. (p. 556)

L’harmonie, me disait-il, n’est qu’un accessoire éloigné dans la musique imitative; il n’y a dans l’harmonie proprement dite aucun principe d’imitation. Elle assure, il est vrai, les intonations; elle porte témoignage de leur justesse; et, rendant les modulations plus sensibles, elle ajoute de l’énergie à l’expresson, et de la grâce au chant. Mais c’est de la seule mélodie que sort cette puissance invincible des accents passionés; c’est d’elle que dérive tout le pouvoir de la musique sur l’âme. Formez les plus savantes successions d’accords sans mélange de mélodie, vous serez ennuyés au bout d’un quart d’heure. De beaux chants sans aucune harmonie sont longtemps à l’épreuve de l’ennui. Que l’accent du sentiment anime les chants les plus simples, ils seront intéressants. Au contraire, une mélodie qui ne parle point chante toujours mal, et la seule harmonie n’a jamais rien su dire au coeur.

As soon as she releases me, Galen grabs my hand and I don’t even have time to gasp before he snatches me to the surface and pulls me toward shore, only pausing to dislodge his pair of swimming trunks from under his favorite rock, where he had just moments before taken the time to hide them. I know the routine and turn away so he can change, but it seems like no time before he hauls me onto the beach and drags me to the sand dunes in front of my house. “What are we doing?” I ask. His legs are longer than mine so for every two of his strides I have to take three, which feels a lot like running. He stops us in between the dunes. “I’m doing something that is none of anyone else’s business.” Then he jerks me up against him and crushes his mouth on mine. And I see why he didn’t want an audience for this kiss. I wouldn’t want an audience for this kiss, either, especially if the audience included my mother. This is our first kiss after he announced that he wanted me for his mate. This kiss holds promises of things to come. When he pulls away I feel drunk and excited and nervous and filled with a craving that I’m not sure can ever be satisfied. And Galen looks startled. “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that,” he says. “That makes it about fifty times harder to leave, I think.” He tucks my head under his chin and I wrap my arms around him until both our breathing returns to normal. I take the time to soak in his scent, his warmth, the hard contours of his-well, his everything. It’s really not fair that he has to leave when he’s only just gotten back. We didn’t have much time to talk on the way back home. We haven’t had much time for anything. “Emma,” he murmurs. “The water isn’t safe for you right now. Please don’t get in it. Please.” “I won’t.” I really won’t. He said please, after all. He lifts my chin with the crook of his finger. His eyes hold all the gentleness and love in the world, with a pinch of mischief. “And take good notes in calculus, or I’ll be forced to cheat off you and for some weird reason that makes me feel guilty.” I wonder what Grom the Triton king would think of that. That Galen basically just stated his intention to keep doing human things. Galen pushes his lips against my forehead, then disentangles himself from me and leads me back toward the water. My body feels ten degrees cooler when his arms fall, and it’s got nothing to do with the temperature outside. We reach the others just in time to see Rayna all but throw herself at Toraf. I can’t help but smile as they kiss. It’s like watching Beauty and the Beast. And Toraf’s not the Beast.

[...] la foi, l'acte de croire à des mythes, des idéologies ou des légendes surnaturels, est la conséquence de la biologie. [...] Il est dans notre nature de survivre. La foi est une réponse instinctive à des aspects de l'existence que nous ne pouvons expliquer autrement, que ce soit le vide moral que nous percevons dans l'univers, la certitude de la mort, le mystère des origines, le sens de notre propre vie ou son absence de sens. Ce sont des aspects élémentaires et d'une extraordinaire simplicité, mais nos propres limitations nous empêchent de donner des réponses sans équivoque à ces questions et, pour cette raison, nous générons pour nous défendre une réponse émotionnelle. C'est de la pure et simple biologie. [...] Toute interprétation ou observation de la réalité l'est par nécessité. En l’occurrence, le problème réside dans le fait que l'homme est un animal moral abandonné dans un monde amoral, condamné à une existence finie et sans autre signification que de perpétuer le cycle naturel de l'espèce. Il est impossible de survivre dans un état prolongé de réalité, au moins pour un être humain.