Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your
liberty.
-The Coda
Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your
liberty.
-The Coda
Corruption wears infinite disguises.
-Tleilaxu Thu-zen
You cannot manipulate a marionette with only one string.
-The Zensunni Whip
Our household god is this thing we carry forward generation after generation:
our message for humankind if it matures. The closest thing we have to a
household goddess is a failed Reverend Mother -- Chenoeh there in her niche.
-Darwi Odrade
Uproot your questions from their ground and the dangling roots will be seen.
More questions!
-Mentat Zensufi
Enter no conflict against fanatics unless you can defuse them. Oppose a
religion with another religion only if your proofs (miracles) are irrefutable
or if you can mesh in a way that the fanatics accept you as god-inspired. This
has long been the barrier to science assuming a mantle of divine revelation.
Science is so obviously manmade. Fanatics (and many are fanatic on one subject
or another) must know where you stand, but more important, must recognize who
whispers in your ear.
-Missionaria Protectiva, Primary Teaching
Making workable choices occurs in a crucible of informative mistakes. Thus
Intelligence accepts fallibility. And when absolute (infallible) choices are
not known, Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where
mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.
-Darwi Odrade
When I set out to lead humanity along my Golden Path I promised a lesson their
bones would remember. I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even
while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet,
conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil
and violence.
-Leto II, the God Emperor
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.
-Darwi Odrade
Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined
only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles
reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definition.
-Mentat Text One (decto)
Spend energies on those who make you strong. Energy spent on weaklings drags
you to doom. (HM rule) Bene Gesserit Commentary: Who judges?
-The Dortujla Record
Battle? There's always a desire for breathing space motivating it somewhere.
-The Bashar Teg
The best art imitates life in a compelling way. If it imitates a dream, it
must be a dream of life. Otherwise, there is no place where we can connect.
Our plugs don't fit.
-Darwi Odrade
Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them
intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you
become totally ignorant.
-Mentat Text Two (dicto)
Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.
-Zensunni koan
Paired opposites define your longings and those longings imprison you.
-The Zensunni Whip
Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.
-Bene Gesserit Coda
We walk a delicate line, perpetuating Atreides (Siona) genes in our population
because that hides us from prescience. We carry the Kwisatz Haderach in that
bag! Willfulness created Muad'Dib. Prophets make predictions come true! Will
we ever again dare ignore our Tao sense and cater to a culture that hates
chance and begs for prophecy?
-Archival Summary (adixto)
Time does not count itself. You have only to look at a circle and this is
apparent.
-Leto II (The Tyrant)
No sweeteners will cloak some forms of bitterness. If it tastes bitter, spit
it out. That's what our earliest ancestors did.
-The Coda
Ish yara al-ahdab hadbat-u. (A hunchback does not see his own hunch. -- Folk
Saying.) Bene Gesserit Commentary: The hunch may be seen with the aid of
mirrors but mirrors may show the whole being.
-The Bashar Teg
Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes
and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go
unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.
-Darwi Odrade
A major concept guides the Missionaria Protectiva: Purposeful instruction of
the masses. This is firmly seated in our belief that the aim of argument
should be to change the nature of truth. In such matters, we prefer the use of
power rather than force.
-The Coda
Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes
even though a need is clearly seen.
-Darwi Odrade
They say Mother Superior can disregard nothing -- a meaningless aphorism until
you grasp its other significance: I am the servant of all my Sisters. They
watch their servant with critical eyes. I cannot spend too much time on
generalities nor on trivia. Mother Superior must display insightful action
else a sense of disquiet penetrates to the farthest corners of our order.
-Darwi Odrade
Religion (emulation of adults by the child) encysts past mythologies: guesses,
hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, pronouncements made in search of
personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always an
unspoken commandment: Thou shalt not question! We break that commandment
daily in the harnessing of human imagination to our deepest creativity.
-Bene Gesserit Credo
When you think to take determination of your fate into your own hands, that is
the moment you can be crushed. Be cautious. Allow for surprises. When we
create, there are always other forces at work.
-Darwi Odrade
All states are abstractions.
-Octun Politicus, BG Archives
When are the witches to be trusted? Never! The dark side of the magic
universe belongs to the Bene Gesserit and we must reject them.
-Tylwyth Waff, Master of Masters
Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating
disease of intellect: self-deception. The best of all possible worlds and the
worst get their dramatic coloration from it. As nearly as we can determine,
there is no natural immunity. Constant alertness is required.
-The Coda