Quotes by Frank Herbert

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - these qualities you find always in that the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush of the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and in our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move towards death.”

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