Frank Herbert Quotes

Biography

Type: Novelist

Born: October 8, 1920

Died: February 11, 1986 (aged 65)

Frank Patrick Herbert, Jr. was an American science fiction writer best known for the novel "Dune" and its five sequels. Though he became famous for science fiction, he was also a newspaper journalist, photographer, short story writer, book reviewer, ecological consultant and lecturer.

Frank Herbert Quotes

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

But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.

The people I distrust most are those who want to improve our lives but have only one course of action.

There is no escape - we pay for the violence of our ancestors.

There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.

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

Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.

The flesh surrenders itself. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not...yet, I occurred.

Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.

Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

The truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

My father once told me that respect for truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. 'Something cannot emerge from nothing,' he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable 'the truth' can be.

We accept too damned many things on the explanations of people who could have good reasons for lying.

Frica este ucigașul minții.

To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There'd be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.

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.

A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both.

Education is no substitute for intelligence.

I am not the river I am the net.

There is only one true wealth in all the universe-living time.

the meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture - it begins in the dignity with which we treat the dead

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error.

To Suspect your Own Mortality is to Know the Beginning of Terror; To Learn Irrefutably that you are mortal is to Know the End of Terror.

One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.

Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.

Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.

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.

They are not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

Religion must remain an outlet for people who say to themselves, 'I am not the kind of person I want to be.' It must never sink into an assemblage of the self-satisfied.

But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.

In 1054, the patriarch of Constantinople and the pope excommunicated each other.
That was the end of holiness for both churches.

Scientists seek the lawfulness of events. It is the task of Religion to fit man into this lawfulness.

Some say," Scytale said, "that people cling to Imperial leadership because space is infinite. They feel lonely without a unifying symbol. For a lonely people, the Emperor is a definite place. They can turn toward him and say: 'See, there He is. He makes us one.' Perhaps religion serves the same purpose, m'Lord.

We have a disturbed relationship with our past which religion cannot explain. We are primitive in unexplainable ways, our lives woven of the familiar and the strange, the reasonable and the insane.

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

Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.

There is a fundamental tension between science and freedom - no matter how science is viewed by its practitioners nor how freedom is sensed by those who believe they have it.

No construirás una máquina a semejanza de la mente del hombre.-Biblia católica naranja-

The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.' And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning, 'That path leads ever down into stagnation.

I 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.

Try looking into that place where you dare not look! You'll find me there, staring out at you!

Fear is the mind-killer.

Face your fears or they will climb over your back.

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.

Absolute power does not corrupt absolutely, absolute power attracts the corruptible.

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.

It was a BuSab axiom that all power blocs tended toward aristocratic forms, that the descendants of decision makers dominated the power niches.

Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.

In politics, the tripod is he most unstable of all structures. It's be bad enough without the complication of a feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science.

You have to appreciate life before you want to preserve it," she said.

"And it's the survivors who maintain the most light and poignant hold upon the beauties of living. Women know this more often than men because birth is the reflection of death.

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.

Life isn't a problem to be solved.
But a reality to be experienced.

Military foolishness is ultimately suicidal. They believe that by risking death they pay the price of any violent behavior against enemies of their own choosing. They have the invader mentality, that false sense of freedom from responsibility for your own actions.

You must learn to rule. It's something none of your ancestors learned.

History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps but it’s never enough. You also must run.

All of history is a malleable instrument in my hands. Ohhh, I have accumulated all of these pasts and I possess every fact - yet the facts are mine to use as I will and, even using them truthfully, I change them.

Every civilization depends on the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness- they cannot work and their civilization collapses

To exist is to stand out, away from the background," The Preacher said. "You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgment of your existence.

motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches.

Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do.' ... 'Small children know,' Leto said. 'It's only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves.

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.

Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny," Paul said. "They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. The constitution is social power mobilized and it has no conscience. It can crush the highest and the lowest, removing all dignity and individuality. It has an unstable balance point and no limitations.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.

My father rules an entire planet."
"He's losing it.

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

In the wrong hands,” Leto said, “monolithic centralized power is a dangerous and volatile instrument.” - “And your hands are the right ones?

One of the key characteristics of an elite corps is its susceptibility to those more powerful than itself. Elite power is naturally attracted to a power hierarchy and fits itself neatly, obediently into the one that promises the most personal benefits. Here is the Achilles’ heel of armies, police and bureaucracies.

Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.

A single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us "The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.

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

If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection; we cannot define what our senses report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe. It was emotions which I missed the most.

We can say that Muad'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.

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