Frank Herbert Quotes

Chani sat back on her heels, submerging her fears in thought as she studied Paul’s face. This was a trick she had learned from watching the Reverend Mothers. Time could be made to serve the mind.

We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences - the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.

The smoke! The golden smoke!
His robe whipped upward, turning him until his face was directed downward into the abyss. With his gaze on the depths, he recognized a maelstrom of boiling rapids there, the mirror of his life-precipitous currents and plunges, all movement gathering up all substance. Leto’s words wound through his mind on a path of golden smoke: “Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.” Moneo fell freely then in the ecstasy of awareness. The universe opened for him like clear glass, everything flowing in a no Time.

That girl! She was like a touch of destiny

There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other. — Proverbs of Muad’Dib

Stilgar put a hand on Idaho’s shoulder. “All men are interlopers, old friend.

Major flaws in government arise from a fear of making radical internal changes even though a need is clearly seen. — Darwi Odrade

Leaders made mistakes. And those mistakes, amplified by the numbers who followed without questioning, moved inevitably toward great disasters.

Men and their works have been a disease on the surface of their planets before now. Nature tends to compensate for diseases, to remove or encapsulate them, to incorporate them into the system in her own way.

You can say things which cannot be done. This is elementary. The trick is to keep attention focused on what is said and not on what can be done.

How do we approach the study of Muad’Dib’s father? A man of surpassing warmth and surprising coldness was the Duke Leto Atreides. Yet, many facts open the way to this Duke: his abiding love for his Bene Gesserit lady; the dreams he held for his son; the devotion with which men served him. You see him there — a man snared by Destiny, a lonely figure with his light dimmed behind the glory of his son. Still, one must ask: What is the son but an extension of the father?

You never talk of likelihoods on Arrakis. You speak only of possibilities.

May thy knife chip and shatter.

Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand.

The Golden Path demands it. And what is the Golden Path? you ask. It is the survival of humankind, nothing more nor less.