Fate & Free Will Quotes in Dune

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #7

[Paul] joined her in the ornithopter, still wrestling with the thought that this was blind ground, unseen in any prescient vision. And he realized with an abrupt sense of shock that he had been giving more and more reliance to prescient memory and it had weakened him for this particular emergency. (25.171)

Paul's sixth sense acts just like one of the original five senses. If too much emphasis is put on one, then the others grow dull. Of course, this suggests that the opposite should also be true. If you lose one of your senses, the others will pick up the slack.

Quote #8

Idaho was with us in the vision, [Paul] remembered. But now Idaho is dead. (27.65)

Paul's future-telling abilities result in a gaffe. He sees one thing, and through the free will of himself or others, another thing happens. Good news for free will, unless you're Duncan Idaho, of course.

Quote #9

And what [Paul] saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action—a wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand—moved a gigantic lever across the known universe. He saw violence with the outcome subject to so many variables that his slightest movement created vast shiftings in the pattern. (32.106)

Herbert draws on the Butterfly Effect to shape his universe's version of fate and freewill. No, no, not that awful movie, but the actual theory of the Butterfly Effect.