Top 500 Frank Herbert Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “Can you remember your first taste of spice?” “It tasted like cinnamon.” “But never twice the same,” he said. “It’s like life – it presents a different face each time you take it. Some hold that the spice produces a learned-flavor reaction. The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable – slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized.”

— Frank Herbert

402. “The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires.”

— Frank Herbert

403. “War is the most readily available form of chaos.”

— Frank Herbert

404. “Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent.”

— Frank Herbert

405. “The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand.”

— Frank Herbert

406. “To the soul’s desires The body listens What the flesh requires Keeps the heart imprisoned.”

— Frank Herbert

407. “Seeing all the chattering faces, Paul was suddenly repelled by them. They were cheap masks locked on festering thoughts – voices gabbling to drown out the loud silence in every breast.”

— Frank Herbert

408. “What is justice? Two forces collide. Each may have the right in his own sphere. And here’s where an Emperor commands orderly solutions. Those collisions he cannot prevent – he solves.”

— Frank Herbert

409. “Shield!” the old woman snapped. “You well know the weakness there! Shield your son too much, Jessica, and he’ll not grow strong enough to fulfill any destiny.”

— Frank Herbert

410. “All around the Lady Jessica – piled in corners of the Arrakeen great hall, mounded in the open spaces – stood the packaged freight of their lives: boxes, trunks, cartons, cases – some partly unpacked.”

— Frank Herbert

411. “But that’s the function I expect of you, cousin. It’s why I chose you. I’ll make it official. I will give you a new name. From this moment, you’ll be called Breaking of the Habit, which in our tongue is Harq al-Ada. Come, cousin, don’t be obtuse. My mother taught you well. Give me your Sardaukar.”

— Frank Herbert

412. “It’s an old, old trick of autocratic rule,” Idaho said. “Alia knows it well. Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.”

— Frank Herbert

413. “What delicious abandon in the sleep of the child. Where do we lose it?”

— Frank Herbert

414. “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.”

— Frank Herbert

415. “That which submits rules.”

— Frank Herbert

416. “Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity.”

— Frank Herbert

417. “Unused power was like a marionette with visible strings, nobody holding them. A compelling attraction: I could make it dance.”

— Frank Herbert

418. “The greatest and most important problems of life cannot be solved. They can only be outgrown.”

— Frank Herbert

419. “Life produces a different taste each time you take it.”

— Frank Herbert

420. “I have come to believe that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.”

— Frank Herbert

421. “War is behavior with roots in the single cell of the primeval seas. Eat whatever you touch or it will eat you.”

— Frank Herbert

422. “The people must learn how well I govern them. How would they know if we didn’t tell them?”

— Frank Herbert

423. “Nothing wins more loyalty for a leader than an air of bravura,” the Duke said. “I, therefore, cultivate an air of bravura.”

— Frank Herbert

424. “Can you collect chaos? Not collecting, that is the ultimate gathering. What can you gather without gathering yourself.”

— Frank Herbert

425. “This is the perspective which you create with your own belief, and beliefs can be manipulated by imagination. You’ve learned only a limited way of looking at the universe. Now you must make the universe your own creation.”

— Frank Herbert

426. “The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist. –.”

— Frank Herbert

427. “The abyss remains. It is pregnant with all the things yet to be. Ah, what gentle violence!”

— Frank Herbert

428. “Humans must never submit to animals.’ “A dry sob shook her. In a low voice, she said: “I’ve been so lonely.” “It should be one of the tests,” the old woman said. “Humans are almost always lonely.”

— Frank Herbert

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

— Frank Herbert

430. “She’s the One all right,” she muttered. “Poor thing.”

— Frank Herbert

431. “To endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe. You cannot hire a wise man or any other intellect to solve it for you. There’s no writ of inquest or calling of witness to provide answers.”

— Frank Herbert

432. “A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fool’s wrath is heavier than them both.”

— Frank Herbert

433. “It is another kind of marriage – the marriage of privilege and duty. It is the aristocrat’s explanation and his excuse.”

— Frank Herbert

434. “Journalism is the entertainment business.”

— Frank Herbert

435. “On Caladan, we ruled with sea and air power,” the Duke said. “Here, we must scrabble for desert power. This is your inheritance, Paul.”

— Frank Herbert

436. “The assumption that a whole system can be made to work better through an assault on its conscious elements betrays a dangerous ignorance. This has often been the approach of those who call themselves scientists and technologists.”

— Frank Herbert

437. “What religion and self-interest cannot hide, governments can,” Edric said.”

— Frank Herbert

438. “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.”

— Frank Herbert

439. “One cannot have a single thing without its opposite.”

— Frank Herbert

440. “Once more the drama begins.′ – The Emperor Paul Muad’dib on his ascension to the Lion Throne.”

— Frank Herbert

441. “The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of a system.”

— Frank Herbert

442. “Religion began as a female monopoly, wrested from them only after its social power became too dominant. Women were the first medical researchers and practitioners. There has never been any clear balance between the sexes because power goes with certain roles as it certainly goes with knowledge.”

— Frank Herbert

443. “Listening carefully to the teacher, one acquires an education.”

— Frank Herbert

444. “Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.”

— Frank Herbert

445. “The past is no farther away than your pillow.”

— Frank Herbert

446. “Irreverence is a most necessary ingredient of religion. Not to speak of its importance in philosophy. Irreverence is the only way left to us for testing our universe.”

— Frank Herbert

447. “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.”

— Frank Herbert

448. “Do not make the error of considering my son a child,” the Duke said. And he smiled.”

— Frank Herbert

449. “Fragmentation is the natural destiny of all power.”

— Frank Herbert

450. “Dune was a world of paradox now – a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power.”

— Frank Herbert