Quotes from Frank Herbert

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?

Face your fears or they will climb over your back.

Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The 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've always known.

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

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

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.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.

Reason is the first victim of strong emotion, Scytale murmured.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: I feed on your energy.

We have eternity, beloved. You may have eternity. I have only now. But this is eternity.

Most men go through life unchallenged, except at the final moment.

Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.

If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.

Think on it, Chani: the princess will have the name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine - never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine - history will call us wives.

The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.

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

The thing the ecologically illiterate don't realise about an ecosystem is that it's a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has order, flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That's why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.

A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel.

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

Mankind has only one science… its the science of discontent.

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

No conocerás el miedo. El miedo mata la mente. El miedo es la pequeña muerte que conduce a la destrucción total. Afrontaré mi miedo. Permitiré que pase sobre mí y a través de mí. Y cuando haya pasado girare mi ojo interior para escrutar su camino. Allá donde haya pasado el miedo ya no habrá nada. Solo estare yo.

Humans are almost always lonely.

It's easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.