Quotes from Frank Herbert

the chant for those committed to the desert, the ones whose water went to Shai-hulud: "Mother of sand, father of Time, beginning of Life, grant him passage.

he had been trained by the best fighters in the universe then seasoned in battles where only the superior few survived.

life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

Não terei medo. O medo mata a mente. O medo é a pequena morte que leva A aniquilação total. Enfrentarei meu medo. Permitirei que passe por cima e através de mim. E, quando tiver passado, voltarei o olho interior para ver se o rastro. Onde o medo não estiver mais, nada haverá. Somente eu restaurei.

sweet sharings upon which arose something of painful beauty.

Paul crouched at the sphincter

Înfrunt?-È›i spaimele sau È›i se vor c???ra în spinare.

Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life," his father said. "Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism.

Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.

Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments.

may your blade chip and shatter

The trouble with some kinds of warfare (and be certain the Tyrant knew this, because it is implicit in his lesson) is that they destroy all moral decency in susceptible types. Warfare of these kinds will dump the destroyed survivors back into an innocent population that is incapable of even imagining what such returned soldiers might do. -Teachings of the Golden Path, Bene Gesserit Archives

I assure you from a God's Olympian perch that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies.

Ocorreu-lhe que a misericórdia era a capacidade de parar, mesmo que apenas por um instante. Não havia misericórdia onde não era possível parar.

Love, that is what you understand, she said. Love. And that is all of it. [...] You have faith in life, Hwi said. I know that the courage of love can reside only in this faith.

this was a living moment, a time to discover regularities within perpetual change, an instant in which to feel that long movement from their Terranic past, all of it encapsulated in her memories.

If you think you own something, that's like walking on quicksand.

The Reverend Mother must combine the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her youth endure. For when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the place-between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of cunning and resourcefulness.

Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life. The object can be started this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck.

machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines.

Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.

I have seen people and their fruitless societies in such repetitive posturings that their nonsense fills me with boredom

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

To attempt an understanding of Muad'Dib without understanding his mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, is to attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing Darkness. It cannot be. —FROM "MANUAL OF MUAD'DIB" BY THE PRINCESS IRULAN