Quotes from Frank Herbert

Militant missionary religions can share this illusion of the proud past, ' but few understand the ultimate peril to humankind-that false sense of freedom from responsibility for your own actions.

My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.

She went through the quick regimen of calmness—the two deep breaths, the ritual thought, then: "When I assign rooms, is there anything special I should reserve for you?" "You must teach me someday how you do that," he said, "the way you thrust your worries aside and turn to practical matters. It must be a Bene Gesserit thing." "It's a female thing," she said.

Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self satisfied.

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.

The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.

There's no secret to balance. You just have to feel the waves.

Paul felt that he had been infected with terrible purpose. He did not know yet what the terrible purpose was.

We have two chief survivors of those ancient schools: the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. The Guild, so we think, emphasizes almost pure mathematics. Bene Gesserit performs another function.

Paul took a place in the line behind Chani. He had put down the black feeling at being caught by the girl. In his mind now was the memory called up by his mother's barked reminder: "My son's been tested with the gom jabbar!" He found that his hand tingled with remembered pain.

He recalled another thing the old woman had said about a world being the sum of many things—the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns—the unknown sum called nature, a vague summation without any sense of the now. And he wondered: What is the now?

Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax.