Frank Herbert Quotes

No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly toward the Truthsayer.

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.

We can say that Maud'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.

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?

You know it's love when you want to give joy and damn the consequences.

If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.

If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you.

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in.

Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.

It is impossible to live in the past, difficult to live in the present and a waste to live in the future.

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

The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind.

Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and has powers of reality.

Here lies a toppled god. His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, A narrow and a tall one.

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.

Truth suffers from too much analysis.

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

When religion and politics ride in the same cart, the whirlwind follows.

What I'm saying in my books boils down to this: Mine religion for what is good and avoid what is deleterious. Don't condemn people who need it. Be very careful when that need becomes fanatical.

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.

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.

Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly.

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments based on wishful thinking.

Silence is often the best thing to say.

Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him once long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.

It is a wise man that does know the contented man is never poor, whilst the discontented man is never rich.

Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.

Every judgment teeters on the brink of error. To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.

Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.

And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.

A voice hissed: "He sheds tears!" It was taken around the ring "Usal gives moisture to the dead!" He felt fingers touch his damp cheek, heard the awed whispers.

Empires do not suffer emptiness of purpose at the time of their creation. It is when they have become established that aims are lost and replaced by vague ritual.

What greater gift is there than to demonstrate you need not fear death?

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we do to each other.

Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit.

A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

Education is no substitute for intelligence.

Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They're a kind of job insurance.

Each life creates endless ripples.

Governments do not know what they cannot do until after they cease to be governments. Each government carries the seeds of its own destruction.