Dune (Dune Chronicles, #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.”

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.’

Contemplate

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

TO THE LADY JESSICA— May this place give you as much pleasure as it has given me. Please permit the room to convey a lesson we learned from the same teachers: the proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger. My kindest wishes, MARGOT LADY FENRING

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh.” —from “Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan

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. —from “Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

And he realized with an abrupt sense of shock that he had been giving more and more reliance to prescient memory and it had weakened him for this particular emergency. “If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.” It was a Bene Gesserit axiom.

Words from the Orange Catholic Bible rang through his memory: “What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”

And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: “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.”

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

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future. —from “Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan

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