"Paul sensed his own tensions, decided to practice one of the mind-body lessons his mother had taught him. Three quick breaths triggered the responses: he fell into the floating awareness...focusing the consciousness...aortal dilation...avoiding the unfocused mechanism of consciousness...to be conscious by choice...blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions...one does not obtain food-safety-freedom by instinct alone...animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct...the animal destroys and does not produce...animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual...the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe...focused consciousness by choice, this forms your grid...bodily integrity follows nerve-blood flow according to the deepest awareness of cell needs...all things/cells/beings are impermanent...strive for flow-permanence within..."

"Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert."

"If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets."

"Mood? What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises — no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting."

"In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack. Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!"

"A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it."

"The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience."

"A world is supported by four things...the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing... without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!"

"That which submits rules....The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows — a wall against the wind. This is the willow's purpose."

"You well know the weakness there! Shield your son too much, Jessica, and he'll not grow strong enough to fulfill any destiny."

"In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures."

"To attempt an understanding of Muad'Dib without understanding his mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be."

"The drug's dangerous," she said, "but it gives insight. When a Truthsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory — in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past...but only feminine avenues." Her voice took on a note of sadness. "Yet, there's a place where no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot — into both feminine and masculine pasts." "Your Kwisatz Haderach?" "Yes, the one who can be many places at once: the Kwisatz Haderach. Many men have tried the drug . . . so many, but none has succeeded." "They tried and failed, all of them?" "Oh, no." She shook her head. "They tried and died."

""We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. The Guild, so we think, emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs another function." "Politics," he said. "Kull wahad!" the old woman said. She sent a hard glance at Jessica. "I've not told him. Your Reverence," Jessica said. The Reverend Mother returned her attention to Paul. "You did that on remarkably few clues," she said."

"Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

"Hope clouds observation."

"You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind."

"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."

"May you always drink deep."

"I give you the water of life."

"Our nest is yours."

"With water of life we grow closer."

"Thou art God. May you always drink deep May you never be thirsty."

"I mean it. A confidence man knows he's lying; that limits his scope. But a successful shaman believes what he says — and belief is contagious; there is no limit to his scope. But I lacked the necessary confidence in my own infallibility; I could never become a prophet ... just a critic — a sort of fourth-rate prophet with delusions of gender."

""Audacity, always audacity" — soundest principle of strategy. In practicing medicine I learned that when you are most at loss is the time when you must appear confident. In law I had learned that, when your case seems hopeless, you must impress the jury with your relaxed certainty."

"Kiss girls all you want to — it beats the hell out of card games."

"Who said I was wise? I'm a professional bad example. You can learn a lot by watching me. Or listening to me. Either one."

"A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human 'wisdom'...and the other twenty percent isn't very important."

"I do know that the slickest way to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time — and then shut up."

"Is there more than one Berquist?" "Maybe not; he is something of a bastard."

"Each sunrise is a precious jewel…for it may never be followed by its sunset."

"Man, as a social animal, can no more escape government than the individual can escape bondage to his bowels."

"If one tenth of one percent of the population is capable of getting the news, then all you have to do is show them — and in a matter of some generations all the stupid ones will die out and those with your discipline will inherit the Earth. Whenever that is — a thousand years from now, or ten thousand — will be plenty soon enough to worry about whether some new hurdle is necessary to make them jump higher. But don't go getting faint-hearted because only a handful have turned into angels overnight. Personally, I never expected any of them to manage it."

"My failures are so much more numerous than my successes that I am beginning to wonder if full grokking will show that I am on the wrong track entirely — that this race must be split up, hating each other, fighting each other, constantly unhappy and at war even with their own individual selves… simply to have that weeding out that every race must have."

"The ability to grok more of the universe than that piece you happen to be standing on at the moment. Mike has it from years of Martian discipline."

"Mike is our Prometheus — but that's all. Mike keeps emphazing this. Thou art God, I am God, he is God — all that groks. Mike is a man like the rest of us. A superior man admittedly — a lesser man taught the things the Martians know, might have set himself up as a pipsqueak god. Mike is above that temptation. Prometheus… but that is all."

"Mike is like the first man to discover fire. Fire was there all along — after he showed them how, anybody could use it… anybody with sense enough not to get burned with it."

"You claim to love Jill... yet you won't give her the fair shake you give a crooked politician. Not a tenth the effort she made to help you when you were in trouble. Where would you be if she had made so feeble a try? Rotting in Hell, most likely. You're bitching about friendly fornication — do you know what I'm worried about?" "What?" "Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit. Sweat over that, instead!"

"Eskimos were invariably described as the happiest people on Earth. Any unhappiness they suffered was not through jealousy; they didn't have a word for it. They borrowed spouses for convenience and fun — it did not make them unhappy. So who's looney? Look at this glum world around you, then tell me: Did Mike's disciples seem happier, or unhappier, than other people?" "I didn't talk to them all, Jubal. But — yes, they're happy. So happy they seem slap-happy. There's a catch in it somewhere." "Maybe you were the catch."

"This poor ersatz Martian is saying that sex is a way to be happy. Sex should be a means of happiness. Ben, the worst thing about sex is that we use it to hurt each other. It ought never to hurt; it should bring happiness, or at least pleasure. "The code says, 'Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife.' The result? Reluctant chastity, bitterness, blows and sometimes murder, broken homes and twisted children — and furtive little passes degrading to woman and man. Is this Commandment ever obeyed? If a man swore on his own Bible that he refrained from coveting his neighbor's wife because the code forbade it, I would suspect either self-deception or subnormal sexuality. Any man virile enough to sire a child has coveted many women, whether he acts or not. "Now comes Mike and says: 'There is no need to covet my wife... love her! There's no limit to her love, we have everything to gain — and nothing to lose but fear and guilt and hatred and jealousy.' The proposition is incredible. So far as I recall only pre-civilization Eskimos were this naive — and they were so isolated that they were almost 'Men from Mars' themselves. But we gave them our 'virtues' and now they have chastity and adultery just like the rest of us."

"Jealousy is a disease, love is a healthy condition. The immature mind often mistakes one for the other, or assumes that the greater the love, the greater the jealousy — in fact, they are almost incompatible; one emotion hardly leaves room for the other."

"Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."

"A prude is a person who thinks that his own rules of propriety are natural laws. You are almost entirely free of this prevalent evil."

"We're not trying to bring people to God; that's a contradiction in terms, you can't even say it in Martian. We're not trying to save souls, because souls can't be lost. We're not trying to get people to have faith, because what we offer is not faith but truth — truth they can check; we don't urge them to believe it. Truth for practical purposes, for here-and-now, truth as matter of fact as an ironing board and as useful as a loaf of bread… so practical that it can make war and hunger and violence and hate as unnecessary as…. as — well, as clothes here in the Nest. But they have to learn Martian first. That's the only hitch — finding people who are honest enough to believe what they see, and then are willing to do the hard work — it is hard work — of learning the language it can be taught in. A composer couldn't possibly write down a symphony in English… and this sort of symphony can't be stated in English any more than Beethoven's Fifth can be."

"His idea is that whenever you encounter any other grokking thing — he didn't say 'grokking' at this stage — any other living thing, man, woman, or stray cat… you are simply encountering your 'other end'… and the universe is just a little thing we whipped up among us the other night for our entertainment and then agreed to forget the gag. He put it in a much more sugar-coated fashion, being extremely careful not to tread on competitors' toes."

"Patricia's nature was an endless wish to make other people as happy as she was."

"Patricia Paiwonski gave Ben Caxton the all-out kiss of brotherhood before he knew what hit him."

"Mmm, one does have to learn to look at art. But it's up to the artist to use the language that can be understood. Most of these jokers don't want to use the language you and I can learn; they would rather sneer because we 'fail' to see what they're driving at. If anything. Obscurity is the refuge of the incompetent."

"Jubal, why isn't there stuff like this around where a person can see it?" "Because the world has gone nutty and contemporary art always paints the spirit of its times. Rodin died about the time the world started flipping its lid. His successors noted the amazing things he had done with light and shadow and mass and composition and they copied that part. What they failed to see was that the master told stories that laid bare the human heart. They became contemptuous of painting or sculpture that told a stories — they dubbed such work 'literary.' They went all out for abstractions. Jubal shrugged. "Abstract design is all right — for wall paper or linoleum. But art is the process of evoking pity and terror. What modern artists do is pseudo-intellectual masturbation. Creative art is intercourse, in which the artist renders emotional his audience. These laddies who won't deign to do that — or can't — lost the public."