More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“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.”
the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave.
“How’d that sit with her?” “I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.
‘Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.’
“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”
Think you carefully on this Bene Gesserit proverb and perhaps you will see: “Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.”
The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of a system. Blood’s an efficient energy source.”
“The newcomer to Arrakis frequently underestimates the importance of water here. You are dealing, you see, with the Law of the Minimum.” She heard the testing quality in his voice, said, “Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.”
The natural human’s an animal without logic. Your projection of logic onto all affairs is unnatural, but suffered to continue for its usefulness.
“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.
the tender indignities of physical love, the sharing and communion of selves, the softness and the violence.
“You’ve ridden the little ones bred for the seed and the Water of Life,” Stilgar had said. “But what you’ll summon for your test is a wild maker, an old man of the desert. You must have proper respect for such a one.”
Something seemed to chuckle and rub its hands within him. And Paul thought: How little the universe knows about the nature of real cruelty!
And among the lackeys stood one of the Emperor’s daughters, the Princess Irulan, a woman they said was being trained in the deepest of the Bene Gesserit ways, destined to be a Reverend Mother. She was tall, blonde, face of chiseled beauty, green eyes that looked past and through him.
Out of the sand haze came an orderly mass of flashing shapes—great rising curves with crystal spokes that resolved into the gaping mouths of sandworms, a massed wall of them, each with troops of Fremen riding to the attack. They came in a hissing wedge, robes whipping in the wind as they cut through the melee on the plain.
But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate.
“There will be flowing water here open to the sky and green oases rich with good things. But we have the spice to think of, too. Thus there will always be desert on Arrakis … and fierce winds, and trials to toughen a man. We Fremen have a saying: ‘God created Arrakis to train the faithful.’ One cannot go against the word of God.”
To the people whose labors go beyond ideas into the realm of “real materials”—to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they may be, in whatever time they work, this effort at prediction is dedicated in humility and admiration.
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
It became apparent to the Fremen that Kynes was not a madman totally, just mad enough to be holy.
