“Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. 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. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.”

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

“We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt.”

“Egg yolks also contain choline and B vitamins.”

“Young people are experts on leisure, water skiing, dancing, rock music, rapping, TV watching . . . by and large, chores are a thing of the past.”

“Failure is a trickster with a keen sense of irony and cunning. It takes great delight in tripping one up when success is almost within reach.”

“Take the broken pieces of your life, bake a master cake out of it. Don't stand still like a lake; keep flowing like a stream!

“You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love.”

“God determines greatness by how many people you serve, not how many people serve you.”

“The mind is the battlefield.”

“From a wise mind comes wise speech; the words of the wise are persuasive. Kind words are like honey—sweet to the soul and healthy for the body. PROVERBS 16:23–24 NLT”

“Your attitude colors every aspect of your life. It is like the mind’s paintbrush.”

“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”

“PROCRASTINATION. The habit of putting off until tomorrow that which should have been done last year.”

“There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”