Dune Messiah 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.

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

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

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.

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

Some lies are easier to believe than the truth.

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.

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

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.

What the eyes had seen could not be erased.

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?

The past is no farther away than your pillow.

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

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

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.

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

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

Growing older is to grow more wicked.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

One moment of incompetence can be fatal.

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

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

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

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

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.

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?

She is the virgin-harlot,” Bijaz said. “She is vulgar, witty, knowledgeable to a depth that terrifies, cruel when she is most kind, unthinking while she thinks, and when she seeks to build she is as destructive as a coriolis storm.

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

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.

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

Dune Messiah is the most misunderstood of Frank Herbert's novels. The reasons for this are as fascinating and complex as the renowned author himself.

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.

These are illusions of popular history which 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 triumpths; a good deed is its own rewards; 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

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.

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

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.

There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other. —Proverbs of Muad’Dib

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The future is a thing to be shaped," Scytale said. "Hold that thought, Princess.

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

But, putting on a stillsuit, he put on the desert.

Stilgar put a hand on Idaho’s shoulder. “All men are interlopers, old friend.

...heroic leaders often made mistakes ... mistakes that were amplified by the number of followers who were held in thrall by charisma. (Introduction to Dune Messiah)

In Dune and Dune Messiah, he [Frank Herbert] was cautioning against pride and overconfidence, that form of narcissism described in Greek tragedies that invariably led to the great fall.

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.

There’s always a prevailing mystique in any civilization,” Leto said. “It builds itself as a barrier against change, and that always leaves future generations unprepared for the universe’s treachery. All mystiques are the same in building these barriers—the religious mystique, the hero-leader mystique, the messiah mystique, the mystique of science/technology, and the mystique of nature itself. We live in an Imperium which such a mystique has shaped, and now that Imperium is falling apart because most people don’t distinguish between mystique and their universe. You see, the mystique is like demon possession; it tends to take over the consciousness, becoming all things to the observer.

Dune Messiah, Frank Herbert’s first sequel to Dune, was published in 1969. In that book, he flipped over what he called the “myth of the hero” and showed the dark side of Paul Atreides. Some readers didn’t understand it. Why would the author do that to his great hero? In interviews, Dad spent years afterward explaining why, and his reasons were sound. He believed that charismatic leaders could be dangerous because they could lead their followers off the edge of a cliff.

I don't want to be part of history, I just want to be loved...

governments lie to protect themselves and they make incredibly stupid decisions.

Among my father's most important messages were that governments lie to protect themselves and they make incredibly stupid decisions.

Any delusions of Free Will he harbored now must be merely the prisoner rattling his cage. His curse lay in the fact that he saw the cage. He saw it!

What is justice? Two forces collide. Each may have the right in his own sphere. And here's where an Emperor commands orderly solutions. Those collisions he cannot prevent -- he solves.

Over the years, Penny inhaled the classics—Ready Player One, Dune, and Ender’s Game, though it wasn’t until she was introduced to Messiah, ironically from a guy who was the worst dude in the history of dudes, that she realized sci-fi didn’t have to be so . . . boy.

Something compelling and attractive surrounded walking anonymously at night in the streets of Arrakeen.

One who rules assumes irrevocable responsibility for the ruled. You are a husbandman. This demands, at times, a selfless act of love which may only be amusing to those you rule.

What religion and self-interest cannot hide, governments can," Edric said.

To die before coming to the end of willpower, was that not an aristocrat’s choice? He

Every man carries his own past with him," Hayt said.

People aren’t concerned with love; it’s too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can’t have that, can we? And how do you make despotism lovable?

we are so money-rich and so life-poor.

I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replaces morality.

Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray or countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity.   —

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

I think what a joy it is to be alive, and I wonder if I’ll ever leap inward to the root of this flesh and know myself as once I was. The root is there. Whether any act of mine can find it, that remains tangled in the future. But all things a man can do are mine. Any act of mine may do it. —THE GHOLA SPEAKS ALIA’S COMMENTARY

She rides the sandworm of space! She guides through all storms Into the land of gentle winds. Though we sleep by the snake's den, She guards our dreaming sould. Shunning the desert heat, She hides us in a cool hollow. The gleaming of her white teeth Guides us in the night. By the braids of her hair We are lifted to heaven! Sweet fragrance, flower-scented, Surrounds us in her presence.

The pitfall of Bene Gesserit training, she reminded herself, lay in the powers granted: such powers predisposed one to vanity and pride. But power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe power could overcome any barrier … including one’s own ignorance.

Culture! They dispense culture the better to rule. Beauty! They promote the beauty which enslaves. They create a literate ignorance—easiest thing of all. They leave nothing to chance. Chains! Everything they do forges chains, enslaves. But slaves always revolt.

The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. 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.

There was the feeling in him then that his body had become the manifestation of some power he could no longer control. He had become a non-being, a stillness which moved itself. At the core of the non-being, there he existed, allowing himself to be led through the stress of his city, following a track so familiar in his visions that it froze his heart with grief.

Over the years, Penny inhaled the classics—Ready Player One, Dune, and Ender’s Game, though it wasn’t until she was introduced to Messiah, ironically from a guy who was the worst dude in the history of dudes, that she realized sci-fi didn’t have to be so . . . boy. J.A.’s work was like Ender’s Game, yet where Ender was smart and getting conned ’cause he was a kid, J.A.’s hero Scan knew her worth.