Chapterhouse: Dune

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.

Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your 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 - Chapterhouse: Dune

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.

Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.

What does a mirror look at?

Face your fears or they will climb over your back.

Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.

Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.

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

I am not the river I am the net.

Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention.

Some never participate. Life happens to them. They get by on little more than dumb persistence and resist with anger or violence all things that might lift them out of resentment-filled illusions of security. -Alma Mavis Taraza

All governments needed to remain under suspicion during their time of power including that of the Sisterhood itself. Trust no government! Not even mine!

Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.

Everything you do, everything you sense and say is experiment. No deduction final. Nothing stops until dead and perhaps not even then, because each life creates endless ripples. Induction bounces within and you sensitize yourself to it. Deduction conveys illusions of absolutes. Kick the truth and shatter it!

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.

Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.

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

To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen. — The Amtal Rule

We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences - the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.

Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history. —Bene Gesserit Coda

Revenge is for children and the emotionally retarded.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. —The Coda

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.

Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections.