Dune (Dune #1)

by Frank Herbert

“A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful,” Hawat had said.

“A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful,” Hawat had said.

In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures.

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

“My Lady, when one has lived with prophecy for so long, the moment of revelation is a shock.”

Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

It is said that the Duke Leto blinded himself to the perils of Arrakis, that he walked heedlessly into the pit. Would it not be more likely to suggest he had lived so long in the presence of extreme danger he misjudged a change in its intensity? Or is it possible he deliberately sacrificed himself that his son might find a better life? All evidence indicates the Duke was a man not easily hoodwinked.

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

“When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature’s wants to direct him to that place.”

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

If you can figure out who a man hates, you will learn everything about him

“Religion and law among our masses must be one and the same,” his father said. “An act of disobedience must be a sin and require religious penalties. This will have the dual benefit of bringing both greater obedience and greater bravery. We must depend not so much on the bravery of individuals, you see, as upon the bravery of a whole population.”

“No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero,” his father said.

How much is actual prediction of the “wave form” (as Muad’Dib referred to his vision-image) and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit the prophecy?

A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.”

You must remember that he was an emperor, father-head of a dynasty that reached back into the dimmest history. But we denied him a legal son. Was this not the most terrible defeat a ruler ever suffered? My mother obeyed her Sister Superiors where the Lady Jessica disobeyed. Which of them was the stronger? History already has answered.

“When your opponent fears you, then’s the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.”

“Your suit will be more comfortable when you’ve adjusted to a lower water content in your body,” Stilgar had said.

There’s another thing, Jessica thought. Paul must be cautioned about their women. One of these desert women would not do as wife to a Duke. As concubine, yes, but not as wife.

“They’re recovering Jamis’ water,” Chani said, and her thin voice came out nasal past the nose plugs. “It’s the rule. The flesh belongs to the person, but his water belongs to the tribe…except in the combat.” “They say the water’s mine,” Paul said.

“Combat water belongs to the winner,” Chani said. “It’s because you have to fight in the open without stillsuits. The winner has to get his water back that he loses while fighting.”

Nothing on this planet had so forcefully hammered into her the ultimate value of water. Not the water-sellers, not the dried skins of the natives, not stillsuits or the rules of water discipline. Here there was a substance more precious than all others—it was life itself and entwined all around with symbolism and ritual. Water.

If he died this instant, the thing would go on through his mother and his unborn sister. Nothing less than the deaths of all the troop gathered here and now—himself and his mother included—could stop the thing.

She saw a profound clue to Fremen technology in the simple fact: they were perfectionists.

This was a dream for which men would die willingly. It was another of the essential ingredients that she felt her son needed: people with a goal. Such people would be easy to imbue with fervor and fanaticism. They could be wielded like a sword to win back Paul’s place for him.

Paul sat silently in the darkness, a single stark thought dominating his awareness: My mother is my enemy. She does not know it, but she is. She is bringing the jihad. She bore me; she trained me. She is my enemy.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

Paul felt a burst of anger. The man who had befriended them, helped save them from the Harkonnen hunters, the man who had sent his Fremen cohorts searching for two strays in the desert…another victim of the Harkonnens.

“You saw the stranger woman who went with Chani to the Reverend Mother?” Stilgar asked. “She’s an out-freyn Sayyadina, mother to this lad. The mother and son are masters of the weirding ways of battle.” “Lisan al-Gaib,” the woman whispered. Her eyes held awe as she turned them back toward Paul. The legend again, Paul thought.

“The crop was large and the maker has been destroyed,” Chani said. She began unfastening a coiled spout fixed to the top of the sloshing sack.

Why is time suspended? she asked herself. She stared at the frozen expressions around her, seeing a dust mote above Chani’s head, stopped there. Waiting. The answer to this instant came like an explosion in her consciousness: her personal time was suspended to save her life.

She focused on the psychokinesthetic extension of herself, looking within, and was confronted immediately with a cellular core, a pit of blackness from which she recoiled. That is the place where we cannot look, she thought. There is the place the Reverend Mothers are so reluctant to mention—the place where only a Kwisatz Haderach may look.

But Jessica’s attention was focused on the revelation of the Water of Life, seeing its source: the liquid exhalation of a dying sandworm, a maker. And as she saw the killing of it in her new memory, she suppressed a gasp. The creature was drowned!

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 no hands!” But the people all around me say: “What are hands?”

He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future.

“You are Sihaya,” he said, “the desert spring.”

They’ve a little of the talent, his mind told him. But they suppress it because it terrifies.

“Usul, help me,” she cried. As she spoke, he felt the drug complete its work within him, ripping away the curtains to let him see the distant gray turmoil of his future.

On one side he could see the Imperium, a Harkonnen called Feyd-Rautha who flashed toward him like a deadly blade, the Sardaukar raging off their planet to spread pogrom on Arrakis, the Guild conniving and plotting, the Bene Gesserit with their scheme of selective breeding. They lay massed like a thunderhead on his horizon, held back by no more than the Fremen and their Muad’Dib, the sleeping giant Fremen poised for their wild crusade across the universe.

“Usul, you’re crying,” Chani murmured. “Usul, my strength, do you give moisture to the dead? To whose dead?” “To ones not yet dead,” he said. “Then let them have their time of life,” she said.

So many times you’ve given me comfort and forgetfulness.

The measure of Count Fenring’s friendship may be seen first in a positive thing: he allayed the Landsraad’s suspicions after the Arrakis Affair. It cost more than a billion solaris in spice bribes,

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. —FROM “THE SAYINGS OF MUAD’DIB” BY THE PRINCESS IRULAN

“The Padishah Emperor turned against House Atreides because the Duke’s Warmasters Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho had trained a fighting force—a small fighting force—to within a hair as good as the Sardaukar. Some of them were even better. And the Duke was in a position to enlarge his force, to make it every bit as strong as the Emperor’s.” The Baron weighed this disclosure, then: “What has Arrakis to do with this?” “It provides a pool of recruits already conditioned to the bitterest survival training.” The Baron shook his head. “You cannot mean the Fremen?” “I mean the Fremen.”

“When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong—faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.”

Chatt the Leaper, captain of the Fedaykin, leader of the death commandos who guarded Muad’Dib.

“You must ride the sand in the light of day that Shai-hulud shall see and know you have no fear,” Stilgar had said.

The differences in the ways he comprehended the universe haunted him—accuracy matched with inaccuracy.

“Now, remember what I told you. Do it simply and directly—nothing fancy.