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Title: Dune Authors: Frank Herbert Category:supplementals Number of Highlights: 52 Date: 2025-12-06 Last Highlighted: **
Highlights
âFear 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. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fearâs path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.â
âI 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. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.â
âOnce, 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.â
Tags:scifi,technology
âWhen religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlongâfaster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until itâs too late.â
Tags:perspective
A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.â
Tags:leadership
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.
Tags:favorite,logic,perception,strategy
A world is supported by four thingsâŠ.â She held up four big-knuckled fingers. ââŠthe learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothingâŠ.â She closed her fingers into a fist. ââŠwithout a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!â
Tags:favorite,leadership,virtues
There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a manâwith human flesh.
Tags:parenting
The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.
Tags:perception,progress
âGive as few orders as possible,â his father had told himâŠonceâŠlong ago. âOnce youâve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.â
Tags:leadership,work
âThe mind can go either direction under stressâtoward 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.â
Tags:perspective,problem_solving,stress
My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. âSomething cannot emerge from nothing,â he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable âthe truthâ can be.
Tags:morality,perception,truth
What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
Tags:perception
The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called âspannungsbogenââwhich is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.
Tags:desire,stoic,temperance
When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.
Tags:individualism,law,religion
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
âShe said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.â
Tags:leadership
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
Tags:anger,perception
âGrowth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.â
Tags:growth,perspective
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.
Tags:leadership
You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training, educating and disciplining of the orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic.
âAny road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that itâs a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.â
Tags:perception
The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: theyâd chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation.
âThe willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willowsâa wall against the wind. This is the willowâs purpose.â
âA process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.â
âThe mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.â
Tags:cognition,exercise,psychology
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.
âAnything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it,â she said. âBut itâs a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing thatâs really chewing on us.â
Tags:logic,problem_solving
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. MuadâDib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
Tags:learning
âLife improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life,â his father said. âLife makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism.â
Tags:environment
âReligion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, âI am not the kind of person I want to be.â It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.â
The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and cultureâit begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.
Tags:death
âMoodâs a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood.â
âControl the coinage and the courtsâlet the rabble have the rest.â Thus the Padishah Emperor advised you. And he tells you: âIf you want profits, you must rule.â There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: âWho are the rabble and who are the ruled?â
Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained.
Tags:science
There is no escapeâwe pay for the violence of our ancestors.
Tags:history
Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.
âWhen your opponent fears you, thenâs the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.â
âUse the first moments in study. You may miss many an opportunity for quick victory this way, but the moments of study are insurance of success. Take your time and be sure.â
Tags:knowledge,problem_solving
And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning âThat path leads ever down into stagnation.â
âDo not count a human dead until youâve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.ââ
Tags:death
Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knifeâchopping off whatâs incomplete and saying: âNow, itâs complete because itâs ended here.â
The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions.
Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.â
âI make a point,â the Baron said. âNever obliterate a man unthinkingly, the way an entire fief might do it through some due process of law. Always do it for an overriding purposeâand know your purpose!â
In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures.
âA stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a foolâs wrath is heavier than them both.ââ
âBeginnings are such delicate times.â
âParting with people is a sadness; a place is only a place.â
A plan depends as much upon execution as it does upon concept.â
âNo more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero,â his father said.
âItâs easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.â