Sisterhood Teaching Compilation, with references

 Sisterhood Teaching Compilation, with references

Compiled and arranged by Kumari-emeritus Mirra Zanzibar

 

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.

Litany Against Fear

Dune

 

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.

From the Instruction Manual: Missionaria Protectiva

Children of Dune

 

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class -- whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

Politics as Repeat Phenomenon:

Bene Gesserit Training Manual

Children of Dune

 

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true of false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.

The Open-Ended Proof from The Panoplia Prophetica

Children of Dune

 

Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history.

Bene Gesserit Coda

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Rules build up fortifications behind which small minds create satrapies. A perilous state of affairs in the best of times, disastrous during crises.

Bene Gesserit Coda

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

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

 

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted.

Missionaria Protectiva

Text QIV (decto)

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit. This is the fine point on which all the legal professions of history have based their job security.

Bene Gesserit Coda

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

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.

Bene Gesserit Panoplia Propheticus

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

All states are abstractions.

Bene Gesserit Archives

Octun Politicus

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Do not depend only on theory if your life is at stake.

Bene Gesserit Commentary

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

A major concept guides the Missionaria Protectiva: Purposeful instruction of the masses. This is firmly seated in our belief that the aim of argument should be to change the nature of truth. In such matters, we prefer the use of power rather than force.

The Coda

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

The best art imitates life in a compelling way. If it imitates a dream, it must be a dream of life. Otherwise, there is no place where we can connect. Our plugs don't fit.

Darwi Odrade

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

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

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

No sweeteners will cloak some forms of bitterness. If it tastes bitter, spit it out. That's what our earliest ancestors did.

The Coda

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Enter no conflict against fanatics unless you can defuse them. Oppose a religion with another religion only if your proofs (miracles) are irrefutable or if you can mesh in a way that the fanatics accept you as god-inspired. This has long been the barrier to science assuming a mantle of divine revelation. Science is so obviously man-made. Fanatics know where you stand, but more important, must recognize who whispers in your ear.

Missionaria Protectiva Primary Teaching

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

We witness a passing phrase of eternity. Important things happen but some people never notice. Accidents intervene. You are not present at episodes. You depend on reports. And people shutter their minds. What good are reports? History in a news account? Preselected at an editorial conference, digested and excreted by prejudice? Accounts you need seldom come from those who make history. Diaries, memoirs and autobiographies are subjective forms of special pleading. Archives are crammed with such suspect stuff

Darwi Odrade

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Spend energies on those who make you strong. Energy spent on weaklings drags you to doom. (HM rule) Bene Gesserit Commentary: Who judges?

The Dortujla Record

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Our household god is this thing we carry forward generation after generation: our message for humankind if it matures. The closest thing we have to a household goddess is a failed Reverend Mother -- Chenoeh there in her niche.

Darwi Odrade

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Making workable choices occurs in a crucible of informative mistakes. Thus Intelligence accepts fallibility. And when absolute (infallible) choices are not known, Intelligence takes chance with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.

Darwi Odrade

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

When you think to take determination of your fate into your own hands, that is the moment you can be crushed. Be cautious. Allow for surprises. When we create, there are always other forces at work.

Darwi Odrade

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

We tend to become like the worst in those we oppose.

Bene Gesserit Coda

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Religion (emulation of adults by the child) encysts past mythologies: guesses, hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, pronouncements made in search of personal power, all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always an unspoken commandment: Thou shalt not question! We break that commandment daily in the harnessing of human imagination to our deepest creativity.

Bene Gesserit Credo

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

They say Mother Superior can disregard nothing -- a meaningless aphorism until you grasp its other significance: I am the servant of all my Sisters. They watch their servant with critical eyes. I cannot spend too much time on generalities nor on trivia. Mother Superior must display insightful action else a sense of disquiet penetrates to the farthest corners of our order.

Darwi Odrade

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

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 life them out of resentment-filled illusions of security

Alma Mavis Taraza

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen.

Darwi Odrade

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Humans are born with a susceptibility to that most persistent and debilitating disease of intellect: self-deception. The best of all possible worlds and the worst get their dramatic coloration from it. As nearly as we can determine, there is no natural immunity. Constant alertness is required.

The Coda

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

We walk a delicate line, perpetuating Atreides (Siona) genes in our population because that hides us from prescience. We carry the Kwisatz Haderach in that bag! Willfulness created Muad'dib. Prophets make predictions come true! Will we ever again dare ignore our Tao sense and cater to a culture that hates the chance and begs for prophecy?

Archival Summary (adixto)

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Religion must be accepted as a source of energy. It can be directed for our purposes, but only within limits that experience reveals. He is the secret meaning of Free Will.

Missionaria Protectiva Protective Teaching

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

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

The Coda

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Do not be quick to reveal judgment. Hidden judgment often is more potent. It can guide reactions whose effects are felt only when too late to divert them.

Bene Gesserit Advice to Postulants

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

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

Darwi Odrade

Chapterhouse: Dune

 

Fremen speech implies great concision, a precise sense of expression. It is immersed in the illusion of absolutes. Its assumptions are a fertile ground for absolutist religions. Furthermore, Fremen are fond of moralizing. They confront the terrifying instability of all things with institutionalized statements. They say: "We know there is no summa of all attainable knowledge; this is the preserve of God. But whatever men can learn, men can contain." Out of this knife-edged approach to the universe they carve a fantastic belief in signs and omens and in their own destiny. This is an origin of their Kralizec legend: the war at the end of the universe.

Bene Gesserit Private Reports/folio 800881

Children of Dune

 

See BENE GESSERIT TEACHINGS 2 for more.

All terms and quotes come from the Dune books.

Copyright 1965 by Frank Herbert

 

BENE GESSERIT TEACHINGS

 

The existence of no-ships raises the possiblity of destroying entire planets without retaliation. A large object, asteroid or equivalent, may be sent against the planet. Or the people can be set against each other by sexual subversion, and then can be armed to destroy themselves. These Honored Matres appear to favor this latter technique.

Bene Gesserit Analysis

Heretics of Dune

 

Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person.

Bene Gesserit Teaching

Heretics of Dune

 

The trouble with some kinds of warfare (and be certain the Tyrant knew this, because it is implicit in his lesson) is that they destroy all moral decency in susceptible types. Warfare of these kinds will dump the destroyed survivors back into an innocent population that is incapable of even imagining what such returned soldiers might do.

Teachings of the Golden Path,

Bene Gesserit Archives

Heretics of Dune

 

Technology, in common with many other activities, tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. Capital investment follows this rule, since people generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.

Assessment of Ix,

Bene Gesserit Archives

Heretics of Dune

 

In my estimation, more misery has been created by reformers than by any other force in human history. Show me someone who says, "Something must be done!" and I will show you a head full of vicious intentions that have no other outlet. What we must strive for always is to find the natural flow and go with it.

Conversational Record,

BG File GSXXMAT9

The Reverend Mother Taraza

Heretics of Dune

 

The Tleilaxu secret must be in their sperm. Our tests prove that their sperm does not carry forward in a straight genetic fashion. Gaps occur. Every Tleilaxu we have examined has hidden his inner self from us. They are naturally immune to an Ixian Probe! Secrecy at the deepest levels that is their ultimate armor and their ultimate weapon.

Bene Gesserit Analysis,

Archives Code: BTXX441WOR

Heretics of Dune

 

The outer surface of a balloon is always larger than the center of the damned thing! That's the whole point of the Scattering!

Bene Gesserit response to an Ixian suggestion that new investigative probes be sent out among the Lost Ones

Heretics of Dune

 

The failure of CHOAM? Quite simple: They ignore the fact that larger commercial powers wait at the edges of their activities, powers that could swallow them the way a slig swallows garbage. This is the true threat of the Scattering -- to them and to us all.

Bene Gesserit Council notes,

Archives #SXX90CH

Heretics of Dune

 

At the quantum level our universe can be seen as an indeterminate place, predictable in a statistical way only when you employ large enough numbers. Between that universe and a relatively predictable one where the passage of a single planet can be timed to a picosecond, other forces come into play. For the in-between universe where we find our daily lives, that which you believe is a dominant force. Your beliefs order the unfolding of daily events. If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.

Analysis of the Tyrant,

the Taraza file: Bene Gesserit Archives

Heretics of Dune

 

Love always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?

Bene Gesserit Council Proceedings:

Archives #X0X232

Heretics of Dune

 

The basic rule is this: Never support weakness; always support strength.

The Bene Gesserit Coda

Heretics of Dune

 

The significant fact is this: No Bene Tleilax female has ever been seen away from the protection of their core planets. (Face Dancer mules who simulate females do not count in this analysis. They cannot be breeders.) The Tleilaxu sequester their females to keep them from our hands. This is our primary deduction. It must also be in the eggs that the Tleilaxu Masters conceal their most essential secrets.

Bene Gesserit Analysis,

Archives #X0XTM99..041

Heretics of Dune

 

What social inheritances went outward with the Scattering? We know those times intimately. We know both the mental and physical settings. The Lost Ones took with them a consciousness confined mostly to manpower and hardware. There was a desperate need for room to expand driven by the myth of Freedom. Most had not learned the deeper lesson of the Tyrant, that violence builds its own limits. The Scattering was wild and random movement interpreted as growth (expansion). It was goaded by a profound fear (often unconscious) of stagnation and death.

The Scattering: Bene Gesserit Analysis (Archives)

Heretics of Dune

 

Quite naturally, holders of power wish to suppress wild research. Unrestricted questing after knowledge has a long history of producing unwanted competition. The powerful want a "safe line of investigations," which develop only those products and ideas that can be controlled and, most important, that will allow the larger part of the benefits to be captured by inside investors. Unfortunately, a random universe full of relative variables does not insure such a "safe line of investigations."

Assessment of Ix,

Bene Gesserit Archives

Heretics of Dune

 

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

A Guide to Trial and Error in Government,

Bene Gesserit Archives

Heretics of Dune

 

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. This is one of the secrets by which we shape the fulfillment of our designs. The something more assumes amplified power with people who cannot give it a name or who (most often the case) do not even suspect its existence. Most people only react unconsciously to such hidden forces. Thus, we have only to call a calculated something more into existence, define it and give it shape, then people will follow.

Leadership Secrets of the Bene Gesserit

Heretics of Dune

 

We have long known that the objects of our palpable sense experiences can be influenced by choice -- both conscious choice and unconscious. This is a demonstrated fact that does not require that we believe some force within us reaches out and touches the universe. I address a pragmatic relationship between belief and what we identify as "real." All of our judgements carry a heavy burden of ancestral beliefs to which we of the Bene Gesserit tend to be more susceptible than most. It is not enough that we are aware of this and guard against it. Alternative interpretations must always receive our attention.

Mother Superior Taraza: Argument in Council

Heretics of Dune

 

All organized religions face a common problem, a tender spot through which we may enter and shift them to our designs: How do they distinguish hubris from revelation?

Missionaria Protectiva, the Inner Teachings

Heretics of Dune

 

Concealed behind strong barriers the heart becomes ice.

Darwi Odrade, Argument in Council

Heretics of Dune

 

We are not looking at a new state of matter but at a newly recognized relationship between consciousness and matter, which provides a more penetrating insight into the workings of prescience. The oracle shapes a projected inner universe to produce new external probabilities out of forces that are not understood. There is no need to understand these forces before using them to shape the physical universe. Ancient metal workers had no need to understand the molecular and submolecular complexities of their steel, bronze, copper, gold and tin. They invented mystical powers to describe the unknown while they continued to operate their forges and wield their hammers.

Mother Superior Taraza, Argument in Council

Heretics of Dune

 

One observes the survivors, and learns from them.

Bene Gesserit Teaching

Dune: House Atreides

 

There are weapons you cannot hold in your hands. You can only hold them in your mind.

Bene Gesserit Teaching

Dune: House Atreides

 

We consider the various worlds as gene pools, sources of teachings and teachers, sources of the possible.

Bene Gesserit Analysis,

Wallach IX Archives

Dune: House Atreides

 

No outsider has ever seen a Tleilaxu female and lived to tell about it. Considering the Tleilaxu penchant for genetic manipulation -- see, e.g., related memos on clones and gholas -- this simple observation raises a wealth of additional questions.

Bene Gesserit Analysis

Dune: House Atreides

 

History has seldom been good to those who must be punished. Bene Gesserit punishments cannot be forgotten.

Bene Gesserit Dictum

Dune: House Atreides

 

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

Bene Gesserit Axiom

Dune: House Atreides

 

Perceptions rule the universe.

Bene Gesserit Saying

Dune: House Atreides

 

Speak the truth. That is always much easier, and is often the most powerful argument.

Bene Gesserit Axiom

Dune: House Atreides

 

Hatred is as dangerous an emotion as love. The capacity for either one is the capacity for its opposite.

Cautionary Instructions for the Sisterhood,

Bene Gesserit Archives, Wallach IX

Dune: House Atreides

 

Storms beget storms. Rage begets rage. Revenge begets revenge. Wars beget wars.

Bene Gesserit Conundrum

Dune: House Atreides

 

It is said that there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe -- that nothing remains in its original state, that each day, each hour, each moment, there is change

Panoplia Propheticus of the Bene Gessert

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

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

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

War is a form of organic behavior. The army is a means of survival for the all-male group. The all-female group, on the other hand, is traditionally religion-oriented. They are the keepers of sacred mysteries.

Bene Gesserit Teaching

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

What is this Love that so many speak of with such apparent familiarity? Do they truly comprehend how unattainable it is? Are there not as many definitions of Love as there are stars in the universe?

The Bene Gesserit Question Book

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.

Bene Gesserit Precept

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power all mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is "Thou shalt not question!" But we do anyway. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to which we hae set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind's deepest sense of creativity.

Credo of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

The Unknown surrounds us at any given moment. That is where we seek knowledge.

Mother Superior Raquella Berto-Anirul

Oratory Against Fear

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

There is no reality -- only our own order imposed on everything.

Basic Bene Gesserit Dictum

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand some day. I pray to your presence that this be so. Let the future remain uncertain for that is the canvas to receive our desires. Thus the human condition faces its perpetual tabula rasa. We possess no more than this moment where we dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence we share and create.

Bene Gesserit Benediction

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

The Bene Gesserit tell no casual lies. Truth serves us better.

Bene Gesserit Coda

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgements.

Bene Gesserit Axiom

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp with too much force is to be taken over by power, thus becoming its victim.

Bene Gesserit Axiom

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

How to define the Kwisatz Haderach? The male who is everywhere simultaneously, the only man who can truly become the greatest human of all of us, mingling masculine and feminine ancestry with inseparable power.

Bene Gesserit Azhar Book

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved. They can only be outgrown.

Sister Jessica,

private journal entry

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

Humans must never submit to animals.

Bene Gesserit Teaching

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

To keep from dying is not that same as "to live."

Bene Gesserit Saying

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

Love is an ancient force, one that served its purpose in its day but is no longer essential for the survival of the species.

Bene Gesserit Axiom

Dune: House Harkonnen

 

When we try to conceal our innermost drives, our entire being screams betrayal.

Bene Gesserit Teaching

Dune: House Corrino

 

The less we know, the longer the explanation.

Bene Gesserit Azhar Book (renegade copy)

Dune: House Corrino

 

What can I say about Jessica? Given the opportunity, she would attempt Voice on God.

Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam

Dune: House Corrino

 

One cannot hide from history or from human nature.

Bene Gesserit Azhar Book

Dune: House Corrino

 

Power is the most unstable of all human achievements. Faith and power are mutually exclusive.

Bene Gesserit Axiom

Dune: House Corrino

 

Among sentient creatures, only humans continually strive for what they know is beyond reach. Despite repeated failures they continue to try. This trait results in high achievement for some members of the species, but for others, for those who do not attain what they want, it can lead to serious trouble.

Findings of Bene Gesserit Commission, "What Does It Mean to Be Human?"

Dune: House Corrino

 

The Sisterhood has no need for archaeologists. As Reverend Mothers, we embody history.

Bene Gesserit Teaching

Dune: House Corrino

 

The more tightly packed the group, the greater the need for strict social ranks and orders.

Bene Gesserit Teaching

Dune: House Corrino

 

The human body is a storehouse of relics from the past -- the appendix, thymus, and (in the embryo) a gill structure. But the unconscious mind is even more intriguing. It has been built up over millions of years and represents a history throughout its synaptic traces, some of which do not appear to be useful in modern times. It is difficult to find everything that is there.

From a Secret Bene Gesserit Symposium on Other Memory

Dune: House Corrino

 

In a technological culture, progress may be viewed as the attempt to move more quickly into the future, rushing to make known the unknown.

Mother Superior Harishka

Dune: House Corrino

 

A thought derived from intensity of feeling is localized in the heart. Abstract thought must be localized in the brain.

Bene Gesserit Dictum, The Principles of Control

Dune: House Corrino

 

Laws are dangerous to everyone, innocent and guilty alike, because they have no human understanding in and of themselves. They must be interpreted.

States: The Bene Gesserit View

Dune: House Corrino

 

There are no facts -- only observational postulates in an endlessly regenerative hodgepodge of predictions. Consensus reality requires a fixed frame of reference. In a multilevel, infinite universe, there can be no fixity; thus, no absolute consensus reality. In a relativistic universe, it appears impossible to test the reliability of any expert by requiring him to agree with another expert. Both can be correct, each in his own inertial system.

Bene Gesserit Azhar Book

Dune: House Corrino

 

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

States: The Bene Gesserit View

Dune: House Corrino

 

A secret is most valuable when it remains a secret. Under such circumstances, one does not require proof in order to exploit the information.

Bene Gesserit Dictum

Dune: House Corrino

 

We could be dreaming all the time, but we do not perceive those dreams while we are awake because consciousness (like the sun obscuring stars during the day) is much too brilliant to allow the unconscious content so much definition.

Private Journals of Kwisatz Mother Anirul Sadow-Tonkin

Dune: House Corrino

 

Diplomats are chosen for their ability to lie.

Bene Gesserit Saying

Dune: House Corrino

 

It is astonishing how foolish humans can be in groups, especially when they follow their leaders without question.

States: The Bene Gesserit View

All States Are an Abstraction

Dune: House Corrino

 

Other memory is a wide, deep ocean. It is available to help the members of our order, but only on its own terms. A Sister invites trouble when she tries to manipulate the internal voices to her own needs. It is like trying to make the sea one's own personal swimming pool -- an impossibility, even for a few moments.

The Bene Gesserit Coda

Dune: House Corrino

 

Humans are different in private than in the presence of others. While the private persona merges into the social persona in varying degrees, the union is never complete. Something is always held back.

Bene Gesserit Teaching

Dune: House Corrino

 

We depend entirely upon the benevolent cooperation of the unconscious mind. The unconcious, in a sense, invents the next moment for us.

Bene Gesserit Precept

Dune: House Corrino

 

Many creatures bear the outward form of a man, but do not be fooled by appearances. Not all such life-forms can be considered human.

Bene Gesserit Azhar Book

Dune: House Corrino

 

The universe is always one step beyond logic.

Lady Anirul Corrino,

personal journal

Dune: House Corrino

 

Who knows what detritus of today will survive the eons of human history? It might be the slightest thing, a seemingly inconsequential item. Yet somehow it strikes a resonant chord, and survives for thousands of years.

Mother Superior Raquella Berto-Anirul, founder of the Bene Gesserit

Dune: House Corrino

 

Does knowledge increase a person's burden more, or ignorance? Every teacher must consider this question before beginning to alter a student.

Lady Anirul Corrino,

private journal

Dune: House Corrino

 

The search for an ultimate, unifying explanation for all things is a fruitless endeavor, a step in the wrong direction. This is why, in a universe of chaos, we must constantly adapt.

Bene Gesserit Azhar Book

Dune: House Corrino

 

Humanity knows its own mortality and fears the stagnation of its heredity, but it does not know what course to take for salvation. This is the primary purpose of the Kwisatz Haderach breeding program, to change the direction of humankind in an unprecedented manner.

Lady Anirul Corrino,

her private journals

Dune: House Corrino

 

It is not easy for some men to know they have done evil, for reasoning and honor are often clouded by pride.

Lady Jessica,

journal entry

Dune: House Corrino

 

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions that have no proof. All things are known because we want to believe in them.

Bene Gesserit Azhar Book

Dune: House Corrino

 

Brutality breeds brutality. Love breeds love.

Lady Anirul Corrino,

journal entry

Dune: House Corrino

 

Truth often carries with it the inherent necessity for change. The most common expression when real change enforces itself is the plaintive cry: "Why didn't anyone warn us?" Truly, they do not hear -- or hearing, do not choose to remember.

Reverend Mother Harishka,

Collected Speeches

Dune: House Corrino

 

There is no doubt that the desert has mystical qualities. Deserts, traditionally, are the wombs of religion.

Missionaria Protectiva Report to the Mother School

Dune: House Corrino

 

All terms and quotes come from the Dune books. Copyright 1965 by Frank Herbert