“It should be one of the tests,” the old woman said. “Humans are almost always lonely.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow...”
―
Frank Herbert
“Sometimes I wonder about Piter," the Baron said. "I cause pain out of necessity, but he...I swear he takes a positive delight in it."
―
Frank Herbert
“The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realise about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, ‘I am not the kind of person I want to be.’ It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.”
―
Frank Herbert
“A plan depends as much upon execution as it does upon concept.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Can you remember your first taste of spice?” “It tasted like cinnamon.” “But never twice the same,” he said. “It’s like life—it presents a different face each time you take it. Some hold that the spice produces a learned-flavor reaction. The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable—slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Paul crouched at the ready and, as he had been trained to do after first blood, called out: “Do you yield?”
―
Frank Herbert
“To accept a little death is worse than death itself,”
―
Frank Herbert
“We came from Caladan—a paradise world for our form of life. There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind—we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life—we went soft, we lost our edge.”
―
Frank Herbert
“I observed you in pain, lad. Pain’s merely the axis of the test. Your mother’s told you about our ways of observing. I see the signs of her teaching in you. Our test is crisis and observation.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Do not make the error of considering my son a child,” the Duke said. And he smiled.”
―
Frank Herbert
“He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.”
―
Frank Herbert
“There's steel in this man that no one has taken the temper out of...”
―
Frank Herbert
“Umman Kudu: scissors-line of jaw muscles, chin like a boot toe - a man to be trusted because the captain's vices were known.”
―
Frank Herbert
