Цитаты из книги Дюна

Процесс нельзя понять посредством его прекращения. Понимание должно двигаться вместе с процессом, слиться с его потоком и течь вместе с ним.

— Мы хотим знать все о вашей науке, ведьма! — Голос Великой Досточтимой Матроны снизился до свистящего шепота. — Давай будем благоразумными. С твоей помощью мы сможем осуществить утопию. Покорить всех своих врагов и каждый раз достигать оргазма.

Face your fears or they will climb over your back.

Laws are dangerous to everyone – innocent and guilty alike. No matter whether you believe yourself powerful or helpless. They have no human understanding in and of themselves.

Laws convey the myth of enforced change. A bright new future will come because of this law or that one. Laws enforce the future. Regulations are believed to enforce the past.

We are too tightly bound up in our difficulties, almost incapable of separating petty problems from great ones.

Are we no more than sensory windows on our universe, each with only a point of view?

Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.

Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own 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.

If you fitted yourself too tightly to one thing, other abilities atrophied. We become what we do.

You seldom learn the names of the truly wealthy and powerful. You see only their spokesmen. The political arena makes a few exceptions to this but does not reveal the full power structure.

Their voices had that end of the workday lift – a false brilliance composed of the hope that old dreams would be fulfilled, yet colored by the knowledge that life would not change for them. It occurred to Lucilla that the people of these streets pursued a fleeting dream, that the fulfillment they sought was not the thing itself but a myth they had been conditioned to seek the way racing animals were trained to chase after the whirling bait on the endless oval of the racetrack.

Memory never recaptures reality. Memory reconstructs. All reconstructions change the original, becoming external frames of reference that inevitably fall short.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

Survival of self, of species, and of environment, these are what drive humans. You can observe how the order of importance changes in a lifetime. What are the things of immediate concern at a given age? Weather? The state of the digestion? Does she (or he) really care? All of those various hungers that flesh can sense and hope to satisfy. What else could possibly matter? Leto II to Hwi Noree, His Voice: Dar-es-Balat

It is your fate, forgetfulness. All of the old lessons of life, you lose and gain and lose and gain again.

By your belief in singularities, in granular absolutes, you deny movement, even the movement of evolution! While you cause a granular universe to persist in your awareness, you are blind to movement. When things change, your absolute universe vanishes, no longer accessible to your self-limiting perceptions. The universe has moved beyond you.

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?

Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.

Life cannot find reasons to sustain it, cannot be a source of decent mutual regard, unless each of us resolves to breathe such qualities into it.