Quotes from Frank Herbert

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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