Quotes from Frank Herbert

The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist.

She said: "My Uncle Malky used to say that love was a bad bargain because you get no guarantees.

The agnostic ruling class for whom religion was a kind of puppet show to amuse the polpulace and keep it docile, and who believed essentially that all phenomena — even religious phenomena — could be reduced to mechanical explanations.

He had acted so strangely before they retired, she thought. Withdrawn. He was like one come back from the dead, not yet fully aware of his return, his eyes half shut and glassy with the inward stare. It made her think of his warning about the spice-impregnated diet: addictive.

We Fremen have a saying: 'God created Arrakis to train the faithful.' One cannot go against the word of God.

Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world's language, that it's different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn't speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn't it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don't hear just with your ears. And I said that's what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.

I give you the desert chameleon, whose ability to blend itself into the background tells you all you need to know about the roots of ecology and the foundations of a personal identity. The Universe is God's. It is one thing, a wholeness against which all separations may be identified.

Dad told me that you could follow any of the novel's layers as you read it, and then start the book all over again, focusing on an entirely different layer. At the end of the book, he intentionally left loose ends and said he did this to send the readers spinning out of the story with bits and pieces of it still clinging to them, so that they would want to go back and read it again. A neat trick, and he pulled it off perfectly.

Humans live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person

With Sardaukar, you must scan them, scope them—both reflex and hard ray—cut off every scrap of body hair. And when you're through, be certain you haven't discovered everything.

Humans live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things.

Command must always look confident, he thought. All that faith riding on your shoulders while you sit in the critical seat and never show it.