Frank Herbert Quotes

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife — chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: “Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.

If you ask "Should we be in space?" you ask a nonsense question. We are in space. We will be in space.

Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount.

There’s no mystery about a human life. It’s not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

He mastered the inner world while holding the outer in contempt, and this led to catastrophe.

He understood terrible purposes. They drove against all odds. They were their own necessity. Paul felt that he had been infected with terrible purpose. He did not know yet what the terrible purpose was.

Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections.

But oh, the perils of leadership in a species so anxious to be told what to do. How little they knew of what they created by their demands. Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.

Why is it that foolishness repeats itself with such monotonous precision?

The person who takes the banal and ordinary and illuminates it in a new way can terrify. We do not want our ideas changed. We feel threatened by such demands. “I already know the important things!”we say. Then Changer comes

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

I succumbed to the lure of the oracle, he thought.
And he sensed that succumbing to this lure might be to fix himself upon a single-track life. Could it be, he wondered, that the oracle didn't tell the future? Could it be that the oracle made the future?

I began with love and prayer,” Moneo said. “I changed to anger and rebellion. I was transformed into what you see before you. I recognize my duty and I do it.

Is it possible this triviality is a code of some sort? the Brain wondered. But how could it be ... unless there's more to these emotional inconsequentials and this talk of a God than appears on the surface? The Brain had begun its career in logics as a pragmatic atheist. Now doubts began to creep into its computations, and it classified doubt as an emotion.

To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.