Children Of Dune

by Frank Herbert

The Friendly Desert, which once had spread from pole to pole, was reduced to half its former size. The mystic paradise of spreading greenery filled him with dismay. It was not like the dream. And as his planet changed, he knew he had changed. He had become a far more subtle person than the one-time sietch chieftain. He was aware now of many things—of statecraft and profound consequences in the smallest decisions. Yet he felt this knowledge and subtlety as a thin veneer covering an iron core of simpler, more deterministic awareness. And that older core called out to him, pleaded with him for a return to cleaner values.

Warren dwellers no longer maintained the tight water discipline of the old days. Why should they, when rain had been recorded on this planet, when clouds were seen, when eight Fremen had been inundated and killed by a flash flood in a wadi? Until that event, the word drowned had not existed in the language of Dune. But this was no longer Dune; this was Arrakis … and it was the morning of an eventful day.

And all the way down through the sietchlike maze of Temple corridors. Idaho brushed at his eyes. Tleilaxu eyes were not immune to tears.

the mind would run where the flesh could not.

“To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror; to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.”

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

“All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.”

“I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections.”

“If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you. This is a common error. Even I, your teacher, have made it.”

“Alia grasps the power firmly now.” She looked back at Idaho. “You understand? One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.”

Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning.

‘In doing good, avoid notoriety; in doing evil, avoid self-awareness.’ ”

“You are a child seeking to be a man. When you are a man, you will seek in vain for the child you were.”

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

“Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is ‘Thou shalt not question!’ But we question. We break that commandment as a matter of course The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind’s deepest sense of creativity.”

She torments me and oppresses me by her very existence.

He had never liked command anyway. Command always waited while others did the interesting and dangerous things.

“To stay awake all night adds a day to your life,”