What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?

— Frank Herbert

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 ballet. It's not for fighting.

— Frank Herbert

What's law? Control? Law filters chaos and what drips through? Serenity? Law -- our highest ideal and our basest nature. Don't look too closely at the law. Do, and you'll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You'll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.

— Frank Herbert

What the eyes had seen could not be erased.

— Frank Herbert

What was it St. Augustine said? "The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.

— Frank Herbert

What you of the CHAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness — they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

— Frank Herbert

When a Soothsayer's gifted by the drug, she can look many places in her memory - in her body's memory. We look down so many avenues of the past... but only feminine avenues... Yet there's a place no Soothsayer can see. We are repelled by it, terrorized. It is said a man will come one day and find in the gift of the drug his inward eye. He will look where we cannot - into both feminine and masculine pasts... Many men have tried the drug... so many, but none has succeeded."" They tried and failed, all of them?"" They tried and died.

— Frank Herbert

When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong - faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.

— Frank Herbert

When strangers meet, great allowances should be made for differences in custom and training.

— Frank Herbert

When we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan.

— Frank Herbert