dune house harkonnen quotes

Behold, O Man, you can create life. You can destroy life. But, lo, you have
no choice but to experience life. And therein lies both your greatest strength
and your greatest weakness.

-Orange Catholic Bible, Book of Kimla Septima, 5:3

The individual is shocked by the overwhelming discovery of his own mortality.
The species, however, is different. It need not die.

-PARDOT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer

Enemies strengthen you; allies weaken.

-EMPEROR ELROOD IX, Deathbed Insights

Nature has moved inexplicably backward and forward to produce this marvelous,
subtle Spice. One is tempted to suggest that only divine intervention could
possibly have produced a substance which in one aspect extends human life and
in another opens the inner doors of the psyche to the wonders of Time and
Creation.

-HIDAR FEN AJIDICA, Laboratory Notes on the Nature of Melange

Before us, all methods of learning were tainted by instinct. Before us,
instinct-ridden researchers possessed a limited attention span -- often no
longer than a single lifetime. Projects stretching across fifty or more
generations never occurred to them. The concept of total muscle/nerve training
had not entered their awareness. We learned how to learn.

-Bene Gesserit Azhar Book

The individual is the key, the final effective unit of all biological processes.

-PARDOT KYNES

Water is the image of life. We came from water, adapted from its
all-encompassing presence . . . and we continue to adapt.

-IMPERIAL PLANETOLOGIST PARDOT KYNES

The desert is a surgeon cutting away the skin to expose what is underneath.

-Fremen Saying

Heaven must be the sound of running water.

-Fremen Saying

The haughty do but build castle walls behind which they try to hide their
doubts and fears.

-Bene Gesserit Axiom

Immobility is often mistaken for peace.

-EMPEROR ELROOD CORRINO IX

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.

-Mentat Objective Analysis of Human Capabilities

If a man can accept his sin, he can live with it. If a man cannot accept
personal sin, he suffers unbearable consequences.

-Meditations from Bifrost Eyrie, Buddislamic Text

There is no such thing as a law of nature. There is only a series of laws
relating to man's practical experience with nature. These are laws of man's
activities. They change as man's activities change.

-PARROT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer

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.

-DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES

Infinity attracts us like a floodlight in the night, blinding us to the
excesses it can inflict upon the finite.

-Meditations from Bifrost Eyrie, Buddislamic Text

What is each man but a memory for those who follow?

-DUKE LETO ATREIDES

You carve wounds upon my flesh and write there in salt!

-Fremen Lament

Though death will cancel it, life in this world is a glorious thing.

-DUKE PAULUS ATREIDES

The man faced with a life-and-death decision must commit himself, or he will
remain caught in the pendulum.

-From "In My Father's House," by the Princess Irulan