“How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives?” Paul asked. “There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate.
―
Frank Herbert
“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles.
―
Frank Herbert
“He aspires to rule my Barony, yet he cannot rule himself.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free.”
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Frank Herbert
“The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen”—which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.”
―
Frank Herbert
“You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They've discovered they're a people. They're awakening.”
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Frank Herbert
“Do as she says, you wormfaced, crawling, sand-brained piece of lizard turd!”
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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
“There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.”
―
Frank Herbert
“What is the son but an extension of the father? —”
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Frank Herbert
“Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.”
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Frank Herbert
“What do you despise? By this are you truly known. —”
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Frank Herbert
“Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.”
―
Frank Herbert
“And he thought then about the Guild—the force that had specialized for so long that it had become a parasite, unable to exist independently of the life upon which it fed. They had never dared grasp the sword…and now they could not grasp it. They might have taken Arrakis when they realized the error of specializing on the melange awareness-spectrum narcotic for their navigators. They could have done this, lived their glorious day and died. Instead, they’d existed from moment to moment, hoping the seas in which they swam might produce a new host when the old one died.”
―
Frank Herbert