Frank Herbert's Dune Saga Collection: Books 1-3

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.”

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!”

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

‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’

The Fremen stared at the Duke, then slowly pulled aside his veil, revealing a thin nose and full-lipped mouth in a glistening black beard. Deliberately he bent over the end of the table, spat on its polished surface.

“We thank you, Stilgar, for the gift of your body’s moisture. We accept it in the spirit with which it is given.”

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.

“Prepare for violence.”

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

thinking of the Duke’s men rubbing their woes together in the barracks until you could almost smell the charge there, like burnt insulation.

“Power’s a two-edged sword,

Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly.

Failure was, by definition, expendable.

His mind was a bin without end, catching everything. Everything that had ever been: every shout, every whisper, every…silence.

“Parting with people is a sadness; a place is only a place.”

🌅

And the race knew only one sure way for this—the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad.

Superstitions sometimes have strange roots and stranger branchings.”

“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.

“Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife.”

Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly threats to us all.

“The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”

I drove my feet through a desert Whose mirage fluttered like a host. Voracious for glory, greedy for danger,

“Men and their works have been a disease on the surface of their planets before now,” his father said. “Nature tends to compensate for diseases, to remove or encapsulate them, to incorporate them into the system in her own way.”

“You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after.

the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error. Even the hawks could appreciate these facts.

the obvious slows an opponent’s reactions. It takes an instant to interpret a known thing when that thing is exposed as something unknown.

“Mine enemies are like green blades eaten down That did stand in the path of the tempest. Hast thou not seen what our Lord did? He sent the pestilence among them That did lay schemes against us. They are like birds scattered by the huntsman. Their schemes are like pellets of poison That every mouth rejects.”

The flesh belongs to the person, but his water belongs to the tribe…except

“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”

we must find the currents and patterns in these strange waters…if we’re to survive.

She turned away to hide her confusion and was just in time to see the sunset. A violent calamity of color spilled over the sky as the sun dipped beneath the horizon.

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

That which makes a man superhuman is terrifying.

“Guilt starts as a feeling of failure,”

“It’s fear, not the injunction that keeps the Houses from hurling atomics against each other. The language of the Great Convention is clear enough: ‘Use of atomics against humans shall be cause for planetary obliteration.’

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?

She gives water to the dead.

history will call us wives.”

Finished the first book.

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

“warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man.”

He is the fool saint, The golden stranger living forever On the edge of reason. Let your guard fall and he is there!

As with all priests, you learned early to call the truth heresy.

I can only die once.

There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other.

And energy learns.

Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.”