I know the trap of prescience. My father's life tells me what I need to know about it. No, grandmother: to know the future absolutely is to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future. I require more freedom than that.

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

I have little to do with how you'll meet tomorrow, Gurney Halleck. I can only help you meet today.

How excellent! And if you handed one of them the complete scenario of his life, the unvarying dialogue up to his moment of death- what a hellish gift that's be. What other boredom! Every living instant he be replaying what he knew absolutely. No deviation. He could anticipate every response every utterance over and over and over and over and over and…

It's only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth - and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up, we will then begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it was the only one we had.

Every single day the world seems like it is on the brink of falling apart. But then I look outside my window, and things look about the same as they did a week ago. It's almost a form of cognitive dissonance.

The most important thing in the world is the moment you're in now, so take it and be grateful.

I'd rather regret the things I've done than regret the things I haven't done.

Not reaching back for what was lost in my yesterdays. And not reaching for what I hope will be in my tomorrow. But living fully with what is right in front of me. And truly seeing the gift of this moment.

If we all knew each morning that there was going to be another morning, and on and on and on, we's tend not to notice the sunrise, or hear the birds, or the waves rolling into the shore. We'd tend not to treasure our time with the people we love. Simply the awareness that our mortal lives had a beginning and will have an end enhances the quality of our living. Perhaps it's even more intense when we know that the termination of the body is near, but it shouldn't be.

My dear, I'm seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business...

It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand. It stops us from taking anything for granted. It has also taught me about living in the immediate moment.