Frank Herbert - Time Quotes

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

Frank Herbert
I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night rising like great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as long as humans exist.

Frank Herbert
What are you, child, that you need time to learn about yourself?

Frank Herbert
The young reed dies so easily. Beginnings are times of great peril.

Frank Herbert
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
By the time we awaken faintly to the awareness that we have been socially conditioned, we find ourselves so indoctrinated that it's difficult, if not impossible, to break the old patterns... Survival pressures demanding that we evolve, grow, and change, however, continue to proliferate. We don't want to change, but the floodgates open abruptly and we are overwhelmed.
Crisis!

Frank Herbert
Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we're compelled to face.

Frank Herbert
There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.

Frank Herbert
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.

Frank Herbert
Riots and comedy are but symptoms of the times, profoundly revealing. They betray the psychological tone, the deep uncertainties....and the striving for something better, plus the fear that nothing would come of it all.

Frank Herbert
When your opponent fears you, then's the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.

Frank Herbert
No matter how finely you subdivide time and space, each tiny division contains infinity.
But this could imply that you can cut across linear time, open it like a ripe fruit, and see consequential connections. You could be prescient, predict accurately. Predestination and paradox once more.
The flaw must lie in our methods of description, in languages, in social networks of meaning, in moral structures, and in philosophies and religions — all of which convey implicit limits where no limits exist. Paul Muad'Dib, after all, says this time after time throughout Dune.

Frank Herbert
Where is the weapon with which I enforce your bondage? You give it to me every time you open your mouth.

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

Frank Herbert
Ecology is a dirty seven-letter word to many people. They are like heavy sleepers refusing to be aroused. "Leave me alone! It's not time to get up yet!"

Frank Herbert
"A slave is one who must produce wealth for another," the Brain said. "There is only one true wealth in all the universe. I have given you some of it. I have given your father and your mate some of it. And your friends. This wealth is living time. Time. Are we slaves because we have given you more time to live?"

Frank Herbert
Time is a measure of space, just as a range-finder is a measure of space, but measuring locks us into the place we measure.

Frank Herbert