“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles.
―
Frank Herbert
“Superb accuracy in water measurement, Jessica thought. And she noted that the walls of the meter trough held no trace of moisture after the water’s passage. The water flowed off those walls without binding tension. She saw a profound clue to Fremen technology in the simple fact: they were perfectionists.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Isn’t it odd how we misunderstand the hidden unity of kindness and cruelty?” Jessica”
―
Frank Herbert
“She thought of the boy’s features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns—endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem,” Kynes said, “is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Our civilization appears to’ve fallen so deeply into the habit of invasion that we cannot even obey a simple order of the Imperium without the old ways cropping up.”
―
Frank Herbert
“To accept a little death is worse than death itself.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn’t tell them?”
―
Frank Herbert
“What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?”
―
Frank Herbert
“It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.”
―
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