Frank Herbert

‘I never knew the city man could be trusted completely,’ Stilgar said.
‘I was a city man myself once,’ Paul said.
Stilgar stiffened. His face grew dark with blood. ‘Muad’Dib knows I did not mean—’
‘I know what you meant, Stil. But the test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does. These city people have Fremen blood. It’s just that they haven’t yet learned how to escape their bondage. We’ll teach them.’

I’m the well-trained fruit tree, he thought. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me-all bearing for someone else to pick.

What was it St. Augustine said? she asked herself. “The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”

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.”

When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature’s wants to direct him to that place.”

I’m like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness—until one day the ability to feel is forced into them.

The thought hung in her mind, an enclosing awareness.

And I say: “Look! I have no hands!” But the people all around me say: “What are hands?”

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.

There should be a word-tension directly opposite to adab, the demanding memory, she thought. There should be a word for memories that deny themselves.

Isn’t it odd how we misunderstand the hidden unity of kindness and cruelty

Only liberals really think. Only liberals are intellectual. Only liberals understand the needs of their fellows.”