Frank Herbert's Quotes

When law and duty are one, united by religion, you never become fully conscious, fully aware of yourself. You are always a little less than an individual.

Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.

How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.

Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

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

To attempt seeing Truth without knowing Falsehood. It is the attempt to see the Light without knowing the Darkness. It cannot be.

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.

The difference between sentiment and being sentimental is the following: Sentiment is when a driver swerves out of the way to avoid hitting a rabbit on the road. Being sentimental is when the same driver, when swerving away from the rabbit, hits a pedestrian.

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

Wealth is a tool of freedom, but the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

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?

Enemies make you stronger, allies make you weaker.

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

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test it's a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.

Something cannot emerge from nothing.

The beginning of knowledge is the discovery of something we do not understand.

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

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

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.

Kindness is the beginning of cruelty.

Religion often partakes of the myth of progress that shields us from the terrors of an uncertain future.

Respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality.

The stakes in conflict do not change. Battle determines who will control the wealth or its equivalent.

Truth suffers from too much analysis.