Frank Herbert
One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.Collection: Taken
You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.Collection: Pain
Order generally was a product of human activity. Chaos existed as a raw material from which to create order.Collection: Order
Ready comprehension is often a knee-jerk response and the most dangerous form of understanding. It blinks an opaque screen over your ability to learn. The judgmental precedents of law function that way, littering your path with dead ends. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Self
I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.Collection: Believe
When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom and training.Collection: Differences
We never get far from wealth and all of its masks when we deal with power.Collection: Power
I give you the chameleon, whose ability to blend itself into the background tells you all you need to know about the roots of ecology and the foundations of a personal identityCollection: Roots
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere.Collection: Ends
Madness in method, that's geniusCollection: Genius
Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments based on wishful thinking.Collection: Destiny
In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleeting aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.Collection: Self
Only gods can safely risk perfection ... it's a dangerous thing for a man.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Future
I'm going to rub your faces in things you try to avoid. I don't find it strange that all you want to believe is only that which comforts you. How else do humans invent the traps which betray us into mediocrity? How else do we define cowardice?Collection: Believe
I have no fear, for fear is the little death that kills me over and over. Without fear, I die but once.Collection: Littles
I don't worry about inspiration, or anything like that. It's a matter of just sitting down and working.Collection: Inspiration
There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.Collection: Father
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.Collection: Suffering
Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant.Collection: Intellectual
A requirement of creativity is that it contributes to change. Creativity keeps the creator alive.Collection: Creativity
Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Dream
Give me the judgment of balanced minds in preference to laws every time. Codes and manuals create patterned behavior. All patterned behavior tends to go unquestioned, gathering destructive momentum.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Beautiful
Making workable choices occurs in a crucible of informative mistakes. Thus Intelligence accepts fallibility. And when absolute (infallible) choices are not known, Intelligence takes chances with limited data in an arena where mistakes are not only possible but also necessary.Collection: Mistake
The most important survival ability for any life form is the ability to change.Collection: Survival
War is behavior with roots in the single cell of the primeval seas. Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you.Collection: War
Most men go through life unchallenged, except at the final moment.Collection: Men
The act of saying that things exist that cannot be described in words shakes a universe where words are the supreme belief.Collection: Belief
You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing.Collection: Writing
Learning a language represents training in the delusions of that language.Collection: Training
There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other.Collection: God
But it's well known that repression makes a religion flourish.Collection: Well Known
I am not the kind of person I want to be.Collection: Want
Is evolution just another name for God?Collection: Names
My lungs taste the air of Time,Blown past falling sands.Collection: Fall
Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount.Collection: Growth
Law is the ultimate science.Collection: Law
A good companion is one you wouldn't mind dying with.Collection: Mind
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.Collection: Father
The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you.Collection: Bees
Enormous problems arise when human mistakes are made on the grand scale available to a superhero... Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe. The mistakes of superheroes involve too many of us in disaster.Collection: Mistake
A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.Collection: Men
To know a thing well, know it's limits; Only when pushed beyond it's tolerance will it's true nature be seen. -The Amtal RuleCollection: Tolerance
The scarce water of Dune is an exact analog of oil scarcity. CHOAM is OPEC.Collection: Oil
No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero.Collection: Fall
The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in.Collection: Greatness