Dune
Arrakis—Dune—Desert Planet
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.
So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: “A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”
Many have remarked the speed with which Muad’Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.
“Please permit the room to convey a lesson we learned from the same teachers: the proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence.”
Most of the Houses have grown fat by taking few risks. One cannot truly blame them for this; one can only despise them.
There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.
Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.
Jessica heard the venom beneath his tone, spoke sweetly: “When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom and training.”
The tooth, Duke Leto Atreides. You will remember the tooth.
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
He had been practicing the awareness-breathing, calming his mind, listening to their captors. The deaf one posed a problem, but Paul contained his despair. The mind-calming Bene Gesserit regimen his mother had taught him kept him poised, ready to expand any opportunity.
Once more, he emerged into the light of the blazing palms. He pulled his cloak around him, stared at the flames. Soon I will know. Soon I will see the Baron and I will know. And the Baron—he will encounter a small tooth.
And he remembered Hawat’s words: “Parting with people is a sadness; a place is only a place.”
Paul heard his mother’s grief and felt the emptiness within himself. I have no grief, he thought. Why? Why? He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.
“A time to get and time to lose,” Jessica thought, quoting to herself from the O.C. Bible. “A time to keep and a time to cast away; a time for love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace.”
She looked at Paul’s face, his eyes—the inward stare. And she knew where she had seen such a look before: pictured in records of disasters—on the faces of children who experienced starvation or terrible injury. The eyes were like pits, mouth a straight line, cheeks indrawn.
It’s the look of terrible awareness, she thought, of someone forced to the knowledge of his own mortality.
“The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-hulud, Old Father Eternity,” he said. “They say: ‘Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.’”
My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. “Something cannot emerge from nothing,” he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable “the truth” can be.
“If you only rely on your eyes, your other senses weaken.”
What do you despise? By this you are truly known.
Words from the Orange Catholic Bible rang through his memory: “What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”
It occured to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.
“Cool your sorrow—we’ve the diversions for it; three things there are that ease the heart—water, green grass, and the beauty of woman.”
The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen”—which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
There was danger, he felt, of overrunning himself, and he had to hold onto his awareness of the present, sensing the blurred deflection of experience, the flowing moment, the continual solidification of that-which-is into the perpetual-was.
“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.”
“You are Paul-Muad’Dib,” Stilgar said.
God created Arrakis to train the faithful.
A Bene Gesserit axiom came to Jessica’s mind: “Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.
The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
That which makes a man superhuman is terrifying.
“Guilt starts as a feeling of failure,” he reminded.
“To accept a little death is worse than death itself,” Chani said.
And I say, “Look! I have no hands!” But the people all around me say: “What are hands?”
“You cannot back into the future,” he said.
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.
In what other society of our universe, she asked herself, could a person of my station accept an anonymous drink and quaff that drink without fear?
You cannot avoid the interplay of politics with 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.
How often it is that the angry man rages in denial of what his inner self is telling him.
“What you have not done,” Paul said, “is heard my mother sobbing in the night over her lost Duke. You have no seen her eyes stab flame when she speaks of killing Harkonnens.”
So he has listened, she thought. Tears blinded her eyes.
In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it.
I have seen a friend become a worshiper, he thought.