Frank Herbert

Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.

Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, we can say that Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!

Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people.

Think on it, Chani: the princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine - never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine - history will call us wives.

Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.

His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: "Now it's complete because it's ended here."

There's hope left in these dusty chords. There's a song left in our rusty hearts. We are torn and frayed but love remains.

Riots and comedy are but symptoms of the times, profoundly revealing. They betray the psychological tone, the deep uncertainties....and the striving for something better, plus the fear that nothing would come of it all.

Most men go through life unchallenged, except at the final moment.

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror, to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?

Truth suffers from too much analysis.