“There’s another thing, Jessica thought. Paul must be cautioned about their women. One of these desert women would not do as wife to a Duke. As concubine, yes, but not as wife.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Seeing all the chattering faces, Paul was suddenly repelled by them. They were cheap masks locked on festering thoughts—voices gabbling to drown out the loud silence in every breast.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault or cleavage that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond-cutter shatters his gem with a blow of a knife? —”
―
Frank Herbert
“Where is Alia?' she asked.
'Out doing what any good Fremen child should be doing in such times,' Paul said. 'She’s killing enemy wounded...”
―
Frank Herbert
“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
“The test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.”
―
Frank Herbert
“When a Truthsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory - in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past... but only feminine avenues... Yet there's a place no Truthsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot - into both feminine and masculine pasts... Many men have tried the drug... so many, but none has succeeded."
"They tried and failed, all of them?"
"They tried and died.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.”
―
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
“It is said in the desert that possession of water in great amount can inflict a man with fatal carelessness.”
―
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
“Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”
―
Frank Herbert
“How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.”
―
Frank Herbert
“they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.”
―
Frank Herbert