“I am like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness - until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. And I say "Look! I have no hands!" But the people all around me say: "What are hands?”
―
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
“I must rule with eye and claw — as the hawk among lesser birds. - Duke Leto Atreides”
―
Frank Herbert
“It was a scene of such beauty it caught all his attention. Some things beggar likeness, he thought.
―
Frank Herbert
“There's an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-healthy planet,' Kynes said. 'You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life. It's aim is simple: to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed system's capacity to sustain life. Life - all life - is in the service of life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.”
―
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
“We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
―
Frank Herbert
“His plan has good points and bad points...as any plan would at this stage. A plan depends as much upon execution as it does upon concept.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body. It keeps your energy up. You’re stronger. Trust your stillsuit.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Are you already training my replacement? Piter demanded.
"Replace you? Why, Piter, where could I find another Mentat with your cunning and venom?"
"The same place you found me, Baron."
"Perhaps I should at that," the Baron mused. "You do seem a bit unstable lately. And the spice you eat!"
"Are my pleasures too expensive, Baron? Do you object to them?"
"My dear Piter, your pleasures are what tie you to me. How could I object to that?”
―
Frank Herbert
“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
―
Frank Herbert
“He doesn’t appear much, does he—one frightened old fat man too weak to support his own flesh without the help of suspensors.”
―
Frank Herbert
“I will await below,” Stilgar said, “while Idaho makes farewell with his friends. Turok was the name of our dead friend. Remember that when it comes time to release his spirit. You are friends of Turok.”
―
Frank Herbert
