Bene Gesserit Axiom Quotes

There's a Bene Gesserit saying," she said. "You have sayings for everything!" he protested. "You'll like this one," she said. "It goes: 'Do not count a human dead until you've seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake. ~ Frank Herbert

You must teach me someday how you do that," he said, "the way you thrust your worries aside and turn to practical matters. It must be a Bene Gesserit thing." "It's a female thing," she said. ~ Frank Herbert

Another might have missed the tension, but she had trained him in the Bene Gesserit Way - in the minutiae of observation. ~ Frank Herbert

Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson. ~ Frank Herbert

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 (and many are fanatic on one subject or another) must know where you stand, but more important, must recognise who whispers in your ear. - Missionaria Protectiva, Primary Teaching. ~ Frank Herbert

Few people paid much attention to the importance of eyes when it came to seduction, he thought. It took a Bene Gesserit upbringing to make that point. Big breasts in a woman and hard loins in a man (that tightly muscular look to the buttocks) – these were naturally important in sexual matchings. But without the eyes, the rest of it could go for nothing. Eyes were essential. You could drown in the right kind of eyes, he had learned, sink right into them and be unaware of what was being done to you [...]. ~ Frank Herbert

We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. The Guild, so we think, emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs another function. ~ Frank Herbert

Schools were started to train human talents ...
The Guild ... emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs ... politics. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human affairs. They saw there count be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock - for breeding purposes. ~ Frank Herbert

We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans. ~ Frank Herbert

The expectations of civilized society should afford all the protection a person needs. But that armor is rendered as thin as a tissue when one is dealing with the uncivilized. -Bene Gesserit Archives ~ Brian Herbert

A beginning is a very delicate time. Know then, that is is the year 10191. The known universe is ruled by the Padishah Emperor Shaddam the Fourth, my father. In this time, the most precious substance in the universe is the spice Melange. The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness. A product of the Spive, the red Sapho juice, stains the lips of the Mentats but allows them to be human computers, as thinking machines have been outlawed. The spice is vital to space travel. The Spacing Guild and its navigators, who the spice has mutated over 4000 years, use the orange spice gas, which gives them the ability to fold space. That is, travel to any part of the universe without moving. Because the Guild controls all interplanetary travel, they are the highest power in the Universe. The Spice also plays a very secret role in the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, of which I am a part. The sisterhood has been interfering with the marriages, and the children thereof, of the great Houses of the Universe, cleverly intermixing one bloodline with another to form the Kwisatz Haderach, a super being. They plan to control this super being and use his powers for their own selfish purposes. The breeding plan has been carried out in a strict manner for 90 generations. The goal of the super being is in sight. But now, so close to the prize, a Bene Gesserit woman, Jessica, the bound concubine of Duke Leto Atreides, who has been ordered to bear only daughters, has given birth to a son. Oh, yes. I ~ Frank Herbert

Survival is the ability to swim in strange water. ~ Frank Herbert

Muad'dib's Jihad was less than an eye-blink in this larger movement. The Bene Gesserit swimming in this tide, that corporate entity trading in genes, was trapped in the torrent as he was. Visions of a falling moon must be measured against other legends, other visions in a universe where even the seemingly eternal stars waned, flickered, died ... What mattered a single moon in such a universe? Far ~ Frank Herbert

She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: "When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late." Paul ~ Frank Herbert

The premise of Ezequiel Morsella's PRISM model7,8 is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict - the impulse to withdraw one's hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you'll die if you act on that impulse - was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atreides qualified as "Human" during their gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert's Dune.) ~ Peter Watts

Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. ~ Ayn Rand

Let this serve as an axiom to every lover: A woman who refuses lunch refuses everything. ~ Enid Bagnold

The idea that to make a man work you've got to hold gold in front of his eyes is a growth, not an axiom. We've done that for so long that we've forgotten there's any other way. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

What was a zero anyway? A zero signified nothing, all it did was tell you nothing about nothing. Still, wasn't zero also something meaningful, a number in and of itself? In jianpu notation, zero indicated a caesura, a pause or rest of indeterminate length. Did time that went uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? If zero was both everything and nothing, did an empty life have exactly the same weight as a full life? Was zero like the desert, both finite and infinite? ~ Madeleine Thien

Few coffee shops have books, fewer have good books, and even less will have one book that can change your whole life. Now, the question is: How many people can find that book? And, among those who do, how many will read it? Because, you see, life always provides opportunities, but not many can see them, when they're just there, waiting to be found, when they come our way, even if in the most unexpected place in the world. One has to be very sharp to recognize a window of opportunity in a wall of illusions. And the ability to redirect attention, demands that one can be capable as well of knowing his own limitations in the vast sea of energy and vibrations. Now, I could be talking about a book, a group or a person, as the axiom remains true to itself. ~ Robin Sacredfire

In one day I had altered my life; my life, therefore, was alterable. This simple axiom did not call out for exegesis; no, it entered my bloodstream directly, as powerful as heroin. I could feel it pump and surge, the way it brightened my veins to a kind of glass. I had wakened that morning to narrowness and predestination and now I was falling asleep in the storm of my own free will. ~ Carol Shields

There is an ancient Celtic axiom that says 'Good people drink good beer.' Which is true, then as now. Just look around you in any public barroom and you will quickly see: Bad people drink bad beer. Think about it. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

In the days following the crash, an axiom as old as the Republic came into play once more. In good times Wall Street wanted Washington to leave it alone. In bad times it wanted Washington to act. ~ Haynes Johnson

It must be noted that the non-aggression alone can never be the starting point in justifying moral behavior or serving as a fundamental principle of ethics. There must be a justification of the non-aggression principle before such a case can be made. The very implication of the term "principle" implies that non-aggression serves as the foundation for a system of ethics, which it cannot be. It is certainly not an axiom since it is not a self-evident truth. ~ Daniel Alexander Brackins

You may take it as an axiom that you cannot profit in Wall Street by continuously doing the obvious or the popular thing ~ Benjamin Graham

[Someone had left the lid off the big tin of fairies and, if they were to be used up before they went off then lovely, moist, stale-fairy cakes were the only option. Nota bene, years later all of the magic would be taken out of these little confections and they would become known in "global" "English" rather more drearily as "cupcakes". This is why you can no longer buy tins of either fresh or dried fairies except in speciality comestible shops.] ~ Ian Hutson

It is an axiom of political science in the United States that the sole means of neutralizing the effects of newspapers is to multiply their number. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Ti voglio bene ... It means everything. It means I love you. It means I want you. It means I want you to be okay. It means everything. ~ Diana Peterfreund

This development had dramatic philosophical consequences. As in the case of the non-Euclidean geometries in the nineteenth century, there wasn't just one definitive set theory, but rather at least four! One could make different assumptions about infinite sets and end up with mutually exclusive set theories. For instance, once could assume that both the axiom of choice and the continuum hypothesis hold true and obtain one version, or that both do not hold, and obtain an entirely different theory. Similarly, assuming the validity of one of the two axioms and the negation of the other would have led to yet two other set theories.

This was the non-Euclidean crisis revisited, only worse. The fundamental role of set theory as the potential basis for the whole of mathematics made the problem for the Platonists much more acute. If indeed one could formulate many set theories simply by choosing a different collection of axioms, didn't this argue for mathematics being nothing but a human invention? The formalists' victory looked virtually assured. ~ Mario Livio

Honesty is the best policy, says the familiar axiom; but people who are honest on that principle defraud no one but themselves. ~ James A. Garfield

It's an old axiom of mine: marry your enemies and behead your friends. ~ Robert N. Lee

Tutto va Bene, All is Well. ~ Sharon Creech

An Italian proverb says, In men every mortal sin is venial; in woman every venial sin is mortal. And a German axiom, that There are only two good women in the world: one of them is dead, and the other is not to be found. ~ George Augustus Henry Sala

At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum's axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business. ~ David Foster Wallace

His work seems to confirm my old axiom: it is useless to try to keep the whole body alive. ~ Adolfo Bioy Casares

You Can't Write Perfect Software. Did that hurt? It shouldn't. Accept it as an axiom of life. Embrace it. Celebrate it. Because perfect software doesn't exist. No one in the brief history of computing has ever written a piece of perfect software. It's unlikely that you'll be the first. And unless you accept this as a fact, you'll end up wasting time and energy chasing an impossible dream. ~ Andrew Hunt

It's a very old axiom, but do you believe the end can justify the means? When there's no choice left? ~ James Dashner

It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either the public or the politicians, who have, indeed, very little to do with one another.) ~ James Baldwin

A major premise of my fictional novel Noah Primeval is that the gods of the ancient world were real spiritual beings with supernatural powers. Thus, the mythical literature and artistic engravings of the gods that have been uncovered by Mesopotamian archeology reflect a certain amount of factual reality. The twist is that these gods are actually fallen divine angelic beings called "Sons of God" (Bene Elohim) in the Bible. ~ Brian Godawa

The first axiom of the family vacation is that someone, possibly everyone, will get sick. ~ Marni Jackson

The most viable method of elaborating the natural-rights statement of the libertarian position is to divide it into parts, and to begin with the basic axiom of the "right to self-ownership." The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to "own" his or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference. Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation. ~ Murray N. Rothbard

The overall structure of the calculus is simple. The subject is defined by a fantastic leading idea, one basic axiom, a calm and profound intellectual invention, a deep property, two crucial definitions, one ancillary definition, one major theorem, and the fundamental theorem of the calculus.
The fantastic leading idea: the real world may be understood in terms of the real numbers.
The basic axiom: brings the real numbers into existence.
The calm and profound invention: the mathematical function.
The deep property: continuity.
The crucial definitions: instantaneous speed and the area underneath a curve.
The ancillary definition: a limit
The major theorem: the mean value theorem.
The fundamental theorem of the calculus is the fundamental theorem of the calculus.
These are the massive load-bearing walls and buttresses of the subject. ~ David Berlinski

Axiom : Novel must have either one living character or a perfect pattern: fails otherwise. ~ E. M. Forster