Herbert Quotes

I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time.

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.

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

Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die.

The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

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

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.

The best mirror is an old friend.

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

Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries.

...at the time, King Herbert felt that to remain safe, the kingdom needed an effective intelligence force." "An intelligent force?" said Will. "Not intelligent. Intelligence. Although it does help if your intelligence force was also intelligent.

Give me your honest opinion. I don't want truth with a veil on—I like naked ladies naked.

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

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

Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.

It is so shocking to find out how many people do not believe that they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult.

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

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.

The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.

Hope clouds observation.

Education is no substitute for intelligence.

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

He who controls the spice controls the universe.

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

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.

Truth suffers from too much analysis. -Ancient Fremen Saying

Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.

Fear is the mind-killer.

Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.

And remember, the truth that once was spoken: To love another person is to see the face of God.

The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.

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

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.

I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind... to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929)

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

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what's incomplete and saying: 'Now, it's complete because it's ended here.' - from "Collected Sayings of Maud'Dib'' by the Princess Irulan

If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.

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

If you need something to worship, then worship life - all life, every last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!

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

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 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.

Bless the Maker and His water. Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people.

Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.

Highly organized research is guaranteed to produce nothing new.

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class - whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy. - Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual

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

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.

Here lies a toppled god. His fall was not a small one. We did but build his pedestal, A narrow and a tall one.

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.

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. -Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times to develop psychic muscles. -- Muad'Dib

The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.

The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind.

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.

All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

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

Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.

Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him once long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.

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

A person needs new experiences. They jar something deep inside, allowing you to grow. Without them, it sleeps- seldom to awaken. The sleeper must awaken.

This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

When I am Weaker Thn You, I ask you for Freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am Stronger than you, I take away your Freedom Because that is according to my principles.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The surest way to keep a secret is to make someone think they already know the answer.

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

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.

Living well is the best revenge.

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!

Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.

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

Do you wrestle with dreams? Do you contend with shadows? Do you move in a kind of sleep? Time has slipped away. Your life is stolen. You tarried with trifles, Victim of your folly.

We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It's gone, but we remain.

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

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.

The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice.

What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger.

A killer with the manners of a rabbit - this is the most dangerous kind.

When I need to identify rebels, I look for men with principles

Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.

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

No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero

What does a mirror look at?

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

It is always a much easier task to educate uneducated people than to re-educate the mis-educated.

The child who refuses to travel in the father's harness, this is the symbol of man's most unique capability. "I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father's rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.

The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.

Paradise on my right, Hell on my left and the Angel of Death behind.

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

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.

The great aim of education is not knowledge but action.

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

The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.

To know a thing well, know its limits; Only when pushed beyond its tolerance will its true nature be seen. -The Amtal Rule

Police are inevitably corrupted. ... Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.

Good governance never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

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. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

Knowing where the trap is—that's the first step in evading it.

Never attempt to reason with people who know they are right!

What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?

Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. Darwi Odrade - Chapterhouse: Dune

You see, gentlemen, they have something to die for. They've discovered they're a people. They're awakening.

Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?

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

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive.

When a wise man does not understand, he says: "I do not understand." The fool and the uncultured are ashamed of their ignorance. They remain silent when a question could bring them wisdom.

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?

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

Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.

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

Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.

Face your fears or they will climb over your back.

Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

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

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

Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.

Woe be to him that reads but one book.

I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.

I see us giving love to each other in a time of quiet between storms. It's what we were meant to do.

A ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel.

The test of a man isn’t what you think he’ll do. It’s what he actually does.

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

For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow's life.

Humans are almost always lonely.

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

To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.

You aren't thinking or really existing unless you're willing to risk even your own sanity in the judgement of your existence.

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.

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

Guilt starts as a feeling of failure.

You do not beg the sun for mercy. -Maud'dib's Travail from The Stilgar Commentary

...a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention...

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

The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life--we went soft, we lost our edge.

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.

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

Storms make oaks take deeper root.

Gilgamesh was called a god and a man; Enkidu was an animal and a man. It is the story of their becoming human together.

It was mostly sweet," he whispered, "and you were the sweetest of all.

Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it. But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, these things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.

My country owes me nothing. It gave me, as it gives every boy and girl, a chance. It gave me schooling, independence of action, opportunity for service and honor.

Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.

When you imagine mistakes, there can be no self-defense.

For what do you hunger, Lord?” Moneo ventured. “For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions. Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?” “You have said it many times, Lord. It is the ability to change your mind.

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

Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,” Leto explained. “To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning.

Law is the ultimate science.

If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you.

There's hope left in these dusty chords. There's a song left in our rusty hearts. We are torn and frayed but love remains.

Enemies strengthen you. Allies weaken.

If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

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

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.

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God?" Muad'Dib

The wise man molds himself—the fool lives only to die.

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.

My lungs taste the air of Time, Blown past falling sands…

Life is half spent before we know what it is.

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.

Some lies are easier to believe than the truth.

My heart had been touched by him, battered by him, cradled by him as the days passed. He was cruel without meaning to be yet he was kind, and I needed him too much to let myself want him

Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.

I hope that while so many people are out smelling the flowers, someone is taking the time to plant some.

A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.

Often I must Speak otherwise than I Think. This is Called Diplomacy.

Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They’re a kind of job insurance.

He who cannot forgive breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass.

A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.

I don't speak, I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.

I am like a person whose hands were kept numb, without sensation from the first moment of awareness - until one day the ability to feel is forced into them. And I say "Look! I have no hands!" But the people all around me say: "What are hands?

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.

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.

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. Some people never observe anything, Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.

The so-called consumer society and the politics of corporate capitalism have created a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form. The need for possessing, consuming, handling and constantly renewing the gadgets, devices, instruments, engines, offered to and imposed upon the people, for using these wares even at the danger of one’s own destruction, has become a “biological” need.

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 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.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

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.

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.

Many have marked the speed with which Muad'Dib learned the necessities of Arrakis. The Bene Gesserit, of course, know the basis of this speed. For the others, 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. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

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.

If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself — a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.

This is the awe-inspiring universe of magic: There are no atoms, only waves and motions all around. Here, you discard all belief in barriers to understanding. You put aside understanding itself. This universe cannot be seen, cannot be heard, cannot be detected in any way by fixed perceptions. It is the ultimate void where no preordained screens occur upon which forms may be projected. You have only one awareness here—the screen of the magi: Imagination! Here, you learn what it is to be human. You are a creator of order, of beautiful shapes and systems, an organizer of chaos.

There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed…These things are so ancient within us…that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies…It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.

Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it’s that patterns are repeated. My oppressions, by and large, are no worse than any of the others and, at least, I teach a new lesson.   —

The difference between a good administrator and a bad one is about five heartbeats. Good administrators make immediate choices. […] They usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems. […] “A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors. […] Oh, they depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they’ve done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it’s too late to make corrections.