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.”

“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.”

“‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’” Paul quoted. “Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said. “But what the O.C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’

‘That which submits rules.’”

But Muad’Dib did have wonderful companion-teachers. There was Gurney Halleck, the troubadour-warrior. You will sing some of Gurney’s songs as you read along in this book. There was Thufir Hawat, the old Mentat Master of Assassins, who struck fear even into the heart of the Padishah Emperor. There were Duncan Idaho, the Swordmaster of the Ginaz; Dr. Wellington Yueh, a name black in treachery but bright in knowledge; the Lady Jessica, who guided her son in the Bene Gesserit Way, and—of course—the Duke Leto, whose qualities as a father have long been overlooked.

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!”

HMMM

She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’

“If wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets,” he murmured. It was his mother’s expression and he always used it when he felt the blackness of tomorrow on him. Then he thought what an odd expression that was to be taking to a planet that had never known seas or fishes.

They have a saying: ‘Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.’”

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

Jessica stopped beside him, said: “What delicious abandon in the sleep of a child.” He spoke mechanically: “If only adults could relax like that.” “Yes.” “Where do we lose it?” he murmured.

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

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

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.

“Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.”

“Because of an observation made by my father at the time. He said the drowning man who climbs on your shoulders to save himself is understandable—except when you see it happen in the drawing room.” Paul hesitated just long enough for the banker to see the point coming, then: “And, I should add, except when you see it at the dinner table.”

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it,” she said. “But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.”

“Muad’Dib: The Mouse,”

“You’re the Baron’s own daughter,” he said, and watched the way she pressed her hands to her mouth. “The Baron sampled many pleasures in his youth, and once permitted himself to be seduced. But it was for the genetic purposes of the Bene Gesserit, by one of you.” The way he said you struck her like a slap. But it set her mind to working and she could not deny his words. So many blank ends of meaning in her past reached out now and linked. The daughter the Bene Gesserit wanted—it wasn’t to end the old Atreides-Harkonnen feud, but to fix some genetic factor in their lines. What? She groped for an answer. As though he saw inside her mind, Paul said: “They thought they were reaching for me. But I’m not what they expected, and I’ve arrived before my time. And they don’t know it.”

“If you’re not the Kwisatz Haderach,” Jessica said, “what—” “You couldn’t possibly know,” he said. “You won’t believe it until you see it.” And he thought: I’m a seed.

“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.

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

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.”

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

“To accept a little-death is worse than death itself,”

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. Things persisted in not being what they seemed.

“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.”

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

I could kill him, Fenring thought—and he knew this for a truth. Something in his own secretive depths stayed the Count then, and he glimpsed briefly, inadequately, the advantage he held over Paul—a way of hiding from the youth, a furtiveness of person and motives that no eye could penetrate. Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost-Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern—a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he’d ever experienced.

So like, Neville and Harry 🤔 almost

“Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.”

Honestly the weirdest ending I've ever read but 🤷🏻‍♀️ I'm still happy with how much I loved it overall