Quotations

• General quotations.
• Book and play quotations.
• Dune quotations.
• Dune Messiah quotations.
• Eloquence.

General quotations:

If you would be a real seeker after truth, you must at least once in your life doubt, as far as possible, all things.
– René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode, 1637

Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, -- but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth.
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
– Bertrand Russell, Autobiography

"Think not those faithful who praise all your words and actions but those who kindly reprove your faults."
– Socrates

Quotations from books or plays:

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men, I think, have great sadness on earth.
– Dostoevsky, "Crime and Punishment"

You thought, as a boy, that a mage is one who can do anything.
So I thought once. So did we all. And the truth is that as a man's
knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower; until at
last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholely what he must do...
– Ursula K. Le Guin "A Wizard of Earthsea"

Concentrate on a single flame and feed all your passions into it - fear, hate, anger - until your mind became empty. Become one with the void, Tam said, and you could do anything.
– Robert Jordan, "The Wheel of Time"

Silence is the perfectest herald of joy: I were but little happy, if I could say how much.
– Shakespeare (Much Ado About Nothing: II, i, 319)

This above all: to thine own self be true. And it must follow as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.
– Shakespeare (Hamlet)

Guil: We've travelled too far, and our momentum has taken over; we move idly towards eternity, without possibility of reprieve or hope of explanation.
Ros: Be happy--if you're not even happy what's so good about surviving. We'll be all right. I suppose we just go on."
– Tom Stoppard, "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"

Dune quotations:

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.

    The figure in front of [Paul] turned into the moon’s path and he saw an elfin face, black pits of eyes. The familiarity of that face, the features out of numberless visions in his earliest prescience shocked Paul to stillness. He remembered the angry bravado with which he had once described this face-from-a-dream, telling the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam: ‘I will meet her.’
    And here was the face, but in no meeting he had ever dreamed.

The reassurance gave [Paul] a new hold on his world. Bits of solid reality began to dip through the dream state into his awareness. He knew suddenly that he was in a hiereg, a desert camp. Chani planted their stilltent on flour-sand for its softness. That could only mean Chani was near by—Chani, his soul, Chani his sihaya, sweet as the desert spring, Chani up from the palmaries of the deep south.

“Do you smash your knife before a battle?” Paul demanded. “I say this as fact, not meaning it as boast or challenge: there isn’t a man here, Stilgar included, who could stand against me in single combad. This is Stilgar’s own admission. He knows it, so do you all.”

Dune Messiah quotations:

Paul studied the pilgrims all around him, suddenly envious of their intentness, their air of listening to truths he could not hear. It seemed to him that they gained something here which was denied to him, something mysteriously healing.

The immensity of the universe outside the temple flooded [Paul's] awareness. How could one man, one ritual, hope to knit such immensity into a garment fitted to all men?

    "If I could only burn this thing out of me!" [Alia] cried. "I didn't want to be different. … I wanted to be able to laugh," she whispered. Tears slid down her cheeks. "But I'm sister to an Emperor who's worshipped as a god. People fear me. I never wanted to be feared."
    [Duncan] wiped the tears from her face.
    "I don't want to be part of history," she whispered. "I just want to be loved . . . and to love."

"One day each of you will come face to face with the horror of your own existence. One day you will cry out for help. One day each of you will find yourselves alone."
– Alia, to Ghanima and Leto. From the TV miniseries, "Children of Dune."

Eloquence:

"Marvelous melodrama," laughed Silenus. "A real-life Christ-weeping Sargasso of Souls and we're for it. Who orchestrates this shitpot of a plot, anyway?"
– Dan Simmons, "Hyperion"

If being true is thus independent of being recognized as true by anyone, then the laws of truth are not psychological laws, but boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow but not dislodge.
– Frege