Provocations from Frank Herbert's Dune
Quotes On Attitude, Mind & Self, Power, The Way, and Consciousness
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Preface
Frank Herbert’s Dune is a hefty 600-page book widely acclaimed as the best science fiction novel ever written. While you may never read it, I feel moved to share some passages that I find timelessly relevant.
Reading individual book passages without full context diminishes their potency. However, my perspective is that reading some Dune is better than none—especially because Herbert has such an astute perspective—making cherry-picked passages still compelling.
Read these passages slowly, reflecting on each after consuming them, and note that while the thematic bolded headings for each curated section below are my own, the quotes are Herbert’s. May these passages meet you well.
Attitude
“Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.”
“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
“Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife—chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: ‘Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.’”
Mind & Self
“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.”
“Hope clouds observation.”
“What do you despise? By this you are truly known.”
“The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.”
“Time could be made to serve the mind. One concentrated the entire attention.”
“I am a theater of processes.”
Power
“He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.”
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
“Worry saps the strength.”
“Expect only what happens in the fight. That way you’ll never be surprised.”
“The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulge. On that path lies danger.”
The Way
“I have another kind of sight. I see another kind of terrain: the available paths.”
“I can remember every dream, but some are worth remembering.”
“How do you know the difference?”
“I just do.”
“If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.”
Consciousness
“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
“He senses it, the race consciousness that he could not escape. There was the sharpened clarity, the inflow of data, the cold precision of his awareness. He sank to the floor, sitting with his back against the rock, giving himself up to it. Awareness flowed into that timeless stratum where he could view time, sensing the available paths, the winds of the future…the winds of the past: the one-eyed vision of the past, the one-eyed vision of the present and the one-eyed vision of the future—all combined in a trinocular vision that permitted him to see time-become-space.”