Quotes from Frank Herbert

In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost-wind of the jihad in it.

When your opponent fears you, then's the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.

To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.

Sietch: a meeting place in time of danger.

We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.

He has learned that it is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.

Duncan, have I not told you that when you think you know something, that is a most perfect barrier against learning?

No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/ human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, the very future of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.   —FROM THE TLEILAXU GODBUK

For a moment, the sensation of coolness and the moisture were blessed relief. Then, as his planet killed him, 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.

There are proven ways to win the loyalty of tough, strong, ferocious men: play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering.

But oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.

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? —

There are many kinds of ignorance, Streggi. The basest is to follow your own desires without examining them. Sometimes, we do it unconsciously. Hone your sensitivity. Be aware of what you do unconsciously. Always ask: 'When I did that, what was I trying to gain?

Another might have missed the tension, but she had trained him in the Bene Gesserit Way - in the minutiae of observation.

Schools were started to train human talents... The Guild... emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs... politics. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by those who saw the need of a thread of continuity in human affairs. They saw there count be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock - for breeding purposes.

To be sighted in the land of the blind carries its own perils.

What are you, child, that you need time to learn about yourself?

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." " 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind

Time could be made to serve the mind.

The only past which endures lies wordlessly within you.

When we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him.

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.

That is the beginning of knowledge—the discovery of something we do not understand.