“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
“Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.”
―
Frank Herbert
“How the mind gears itself for its environment, she thought. And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: “The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”
―
Frank Herbert
“it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error
―
Frank Herbert
“As long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance.”
―
Frank Herbert
“you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? What is there around us that we cannot—”
―
Frank Herbert
“Paul sensed his own tensions, decided to practice one of the mind-body lessons his mother had taught him. Three quick breaths triggered the responses: he fell into the floating awareness ... focusing the consciousness ... aortal dilation ... avoiding the unfocused mechanism of consciousness ... to be conscious by choice ... blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions ... one does not obtain food-safety-freedom by instinct alone ... animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct ... the animal destroys and does not produce ... animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual ... the human requires a background grid through which to see his universe ... focused consciousness by choice, this forms your grid ... bodily integrity follows nerve-blood flow according to the deepest awareness of cell needs ... all things/cells/beings are impermanent ... strive for flow-permanence within....”
―
Frank Herbert
“She’s the One all right,” she muttered. “Poor thing.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”
―
Frank Herbert
“they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.”
―
Frank Herbert
“It supports a ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings…”
―
Frank Herbert
“Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.”
―
Frank Herbert
“He aspires to rule my Barony, yet he cannot rule himself.”
―
Frank Herbert
“It’d be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.”
―
Frank Herbert
