Great Throughts Treasury

"Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error."

"There are illusions of popular history which a 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 triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; 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."

"There are limits to power, as those who put their hopes in a constitution always discover."

"There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness,"

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

"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."

"There exists no separation between gods and men: one blends softly casual into the other."

"There had to be a science of discontent. For people need hard times, hardship and oppression to develop their mental strength."

"There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites—conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it’s all the same."

"There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - these qualities you find always in that the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush of the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and in our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death."

"There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed… These things are so ancient within us…that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies… It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking."

"There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors."

"There is no measuring Muad'Dib's motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad'Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies' skins, the Muad'Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: 'I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough."

"There is only one true wealth in all the universe--living time."

"There is probably no more terrible enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man--with human flesh."

"There is knowledge you can only gain by participating in it. There's no way to learn it by standing off and looking and talking."

"There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles."

"There was a man who sat each day looking out through a narrow vertical opening where a single board had been removed from a tall wooden fence. Each day a wild ass of the desert passed outside the fence and across the narrow opening—first the nose, then the head, the forelegs, the long brown back, the hind-legs, and lastly the tail. One day, the man leaped to his feet with the light of discovery in his eyes and he shouted for all who could hear him: It is obvious! The nose causes the tail!"

"There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story."

"There was a man so wise, he jumped into a sandy place"

"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."

"There was pain in him - like a blister, all that was left of some lost yesterday that Time had pruned off him."

"There was never a greater anti-Irish bigot than Shakespeare. He was the ultimate Elizabethan jackanapes, a perfect reflection of British bigotry. They justified themselves on the grounds of religion. The Reformation! That's where they began their policy of exterminating the Irish. Back then we learned the bitter truth: England's enemy is Ireland's friend."

"There were many paradise planets in the Old Empire, probably many more among the people of the Scattering. Humans always seemed capable of trying that foolish experiment. People in such places mostly lazed along. A quick-smart analyzis said this was because of the easy climates on such planets. He knew this for stupidity. It was because sexual energy was easily released in such places. Let the Missionaries of the Divided God or some denominational construct enter one of these paradises and you got outrageous violence."

"There was this dry-lander who was asked which was more important, a literjon of water or a vast pool of water? The dry-lander thought a moment and then said: "The literjon is more important. No single person could own a great pool of water. But a literjon you could hide under your cloak and run away with it. No one would know.""

"There’s always the human situation, Paul agreed. A precarious thing at best."

"There’s no mystery about a human life. It’s not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."

"There will be sadness."

"There's a lesson in every temptation."

"There's an unwritten compact between you and the reader. If someone enters a bookstore and sets down hard earned money (energy) for your book, you owe that person some entertainment and as much more as you can give."

"There’s no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves."

"There's no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves."

"There's hope left in these dusty chords. There's a song left in our rusty hearts. We are torn and frayed but love remains."

"These are illusions of popular history which a 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 triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; 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."

"They (good administrators) never lie about what they've done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it's too late to make corrections."

"They are a torture, my memories, a lovely torture."

"They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous."

"They made the fatal decision: they'd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation."

"They were eye-minded creatures and soon it would be night, the time of the ear-minded."

"They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak they create the seeds of turmoil and violence."

"They were such seriously futile people that she found herself wanting to cry out against their ready-made justifications for pointless lives."

"They were undoubtedly sincere in subscribing to the argument that nuclear weapons were a reserve held for one purpose: defense of humankind should a threatening 'other intelligence' ever be encountered."

"Think on it, Chani: the princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine - never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine - history will call us wives."

"Things could not be forever ordered and formulated. He had to find the rhythm of change and see between the changes to the changing itself."

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

"This is the awe-inspiring universe of magic: There are no atoms, only waves and motions all around. Here, you discard all belief in barriers to understanding. You put aside understanding itself. This universe cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be detected in any way by fixed perceptions. It is the ultimate void where no preordained screens occur upon which forms may be projected. You have only one awareness here the screen of the magi: Imagination Here, you learn what it is to be human. You are a creator of order, of beautiful shapes and systems, an organizer of chaos."

"This group is composed of those for whom belief in saucers is tantamount to religion...They believe men from outer space will step in on Earth before it's too late, put a stop to the atomic bomb threat by their superior powers, and enforce perpetual peace for the good of the universe..."

"This is the fallacy of power: ultimately it is effective only in an absolute, a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power."

"Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?"

"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."