The Great Dune Trilogy

by Frank Herbert

“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.”

“Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world.

the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

‘Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world

“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”

“And how easy it is to kill the uprooted plant,” she said. “Especially when you put it down in hostile soil.”

It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

the proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.

Powerful words, if one considers addictive, compulsive personality types like my own.

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.”

He found that he no longer could hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor or even the Harkonnens. They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new-pooling of genes.

This feels similar to the quote in Ender's Game, and it hits just as hard. "In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves."

This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow’s life.

I think this is what most people suffering from depression feel like. I can attest.

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. “Something cannot emerge from nothing,” he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable “the truth” can be.

One's morality is governed by one's social and cultural biases, but basic morality does not need any of that, it only needs the understanding that your fellow sentients are all just trying to make a way in this world.

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error. Even the hawks could appreciate these facts.

Plan all you want, even that has been pre-ordained. Nothing is truly random after the casting of the initial dice that set the universe in motion. You have no real free will, only the illusion thereof.

I’m like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness—until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. The thought hung in her mind, an enclosing awareness. And I say: “Look! I have hands!” But the people all around me say: “What are hands?”

Gaining enlightenment in a society that is not ready to accept it can be frustrating.

“I am I because I am here.”

“The Fremen have a simple, practical religion,” he said. “Nothing about religion is simple,” she warned.

Do not underestimate the influences of blind faith.

“One of the most terrible moments in a boy’s life,” Paul said, “is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It’s a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can’t evade it.

We are born alone, we will die alone. It is our ultimate painful truth.