Dune (Dune #1)

by Frank Herbert

“I must not fear. 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 I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

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.

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”

It was something deeper, something tied to his terrible purpose.

“Listen to my nephew,” the Baron said. “He aspires to rule my Barony, yet he cannot rule himself.”

A world is supported by four things….” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “…the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing….” She closed her fingers into a fist. “…without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!”

Always before, Staff had ended on an incisive air. This meeting had just seemed to trickle out, worn down by its own inadequacies, and with an argument to top it off.

Failure was, by definition, expendable. The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions.

“The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.”

“His plan has good points and bad points…as any plan would at this stage. A plan depends as much upon execution as it does upon concept.”

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called “spannungsbogen”—which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

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.

“Give as few orders as possible,” his father had told him…once…long ago. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”

“There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what’s ruthless unless you’ve plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness?