Quotes from Frank Herbert

Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.

The function of science fiction is not always to predict the future but sometimes to prevent it.

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

We are generalists. You can't draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.

You can not go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after.

Life is a mask through which the universe expresses itself.

Each life creates endless ripples.

He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing.

One of the best things to come out of the home computer revolution could be the general and widespread understanding of how severely limited logic really is.

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.

The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved. They can only be outgrown.

The joy of living, its beauty, is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you.

Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your own life.

The most important survival ability for any life form is the ability to change.

The proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger.

Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human categories.

Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power, Tuek said. You might find the line between life and death among the Fremen to be too sharp and quick.

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

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.

Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things... she held up four big-knuckled fingers. ...the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these things are as nothing... She closed her fingers into a fist. ...without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!

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.

Most civilisation is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.

Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.