“I observed you in pain, lad. Pain’s merely the axis of the test. Your mother’s told you about our ways of observing. I see the signs of her teaching in you. Our test is crisis and observation.”
―
Frank Herbert
“It was a scene of such beauty it caught all his attention. Some things beggar likeness, he thought.
―
Frank Herbert
“She asked me to tell her what it is to rule,” Paul said. “And I said that one commands. And she said I had some unlearning to do.” She hit a mark there right enough, Hawat thought. He nodded for Paul to continue. “She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.”
―
Frank Herbert
“I will await below,” Stilgar said, “while Idaho makes farewell with his friends. Turok was the name of our dead friend. Remember that when it comes time to release his spirit. You are friends of Turok.”
―
Frank Herbert
“the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error
―
Frank Herbert
“ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings.
―
Frank Herbert
“Umman Kudu: scissors-line of jaw muscles, chin like a boot toe - a man to be trusted because the captain's vices were known.”
―
Frank Herbert
“He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.”
―
Frank Herbert
“He doesn’t appear much, does he—one frightened old fat man too weak to support his own flesh without the help of suspensors.”
―
Frank Herbert
“And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life -we went soft, we lost our edge.”
―
Frank Herbert
“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh. —FROM “COLLECTED SAYINGS OF MUAD’DIB” BY THE PRINCESS IRULAN”
―
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
“Pain,” she sniffed. “A human can override any nerve in the body.”
―
Frank Herbert
“The price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life -we went soft, we lost our edge.”
―
Frank Herbert
“Paul sat down where Hawat had been, straightened the papers. One more day here, he thought. He looked around the room. We’re leaving. The idea of departure was suddenly more real to him than it had ever been before. He recalled another thing the old woman had said about a world being the sum of many things—the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns—the unknown sum called nature, a vague summation without any sense of the now. And he wondered: What is the now?”
―
Frank Herbert
