“the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error
―
Frank Herbert
“You must learn to rule. It's something none of your ancestors learned.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Paradise on my right, Hell on my left and the Angel of Death behind.”
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Frank Herbert
“We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It's gone, but we remain.”
―
Frank Herbert
“He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man.”
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Frank Herbert
“My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.”
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Frank Herbert
“I'm the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me”
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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.”
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Frank Herbert
“He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. Something cannot emerge from nothing.”
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Frank Herbert
“learned rapidly because his first training was in how to leam. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.”
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Frank Herbert
“We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”
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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
“Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion and of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation—the curtains whipped away—she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote.”
―
Frank Herbert
“They’d never known anything but victory which, Paul realized, could be a weakness in itself. He put that thought aside for later consideration in his own training program.”
―
Frank Herbert