“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Do actions agree with words? There's your measure of reliability. Never confine yourself to the words.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“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”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Power attracts the corruptible. Suspect any who seek it.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“What does a mirror look at?”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Face your fears or they will climb over your back.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“People don't vote. Instinct tells them it's useless.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“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. Be warned. Understand nothing. All comprehension is temporary.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak they create the seeds of turmoil and violence.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“I am not the river I am the net.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Since every individual is accountable ultimately to the self, the formation of that self demands our utmost care and attention.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Some never participate. Life happens to them. They get by on little more than dumb persistence and resist with anger or violence all things that might lift them out of resentment-filled illusions of security.
-Alma Mavis Taraza”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“All governments needed to remain under suspicion during their time of power including that of the Sisterhood itself. Trust no government! Not even mine!”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Everything you do, everything you sense and say is experiment. No deduction final. Nothing stops until dead and perhaps not even then, because each life creates endless ripples. Induction bounces within and you sensitize yourself to it. Deduction conveys illusions of absolutes. Kick the truth and shatter it!”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Education is no substitute for intelligence. That elusive quality is defined only in part by puzzle-solving ability. It is in the creation of new puzzles reflecting what your senses report that you round out the definition.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Ultimately, all things are known because you want to believe you know.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“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. —Darwi Odrade”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“To know a thing well, know its limits. Only when pushed beyond its tolerances will true nature be seen. — The Amtal Rule”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“We do not teach history; we recreate the experience. We follow the chain of consequences - the tracks of the beast in its forest. Look behind our words and you see the broad sweep of social behavior that no historian has ever touched.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history. —Bene Gesserit Coda”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Revenge is for children and the emotionally retarded.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty. —The Coda”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“I know a profound pattern humans deny with words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, conditions they call peace. Even as they speak, they create seeds of turmoil and violence.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Educational bureaucracies dull a child’s questing sensitivity.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“Create or arouse such unbridled forces and you built carnal fantasies of enormous complexity. You could lead whole populations around by their desires, by their fantasy projections.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Chapterhouse: Dune
“To be successful as a living thing, you have to have offspring, who have offspring, who have offspring. Rest assured, your family did, or you wouldn’t be here. As troubling as it may seem, your parents had sex—at least once. If you have brothers and sisters, more than once … One shudders to think of it.”
― Bill Nye, quote from Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation
“There was always that shadowy twin, thin when i was fat, fat when i was thin, myself in silvery narrative...”
― Margaret Atwood, quote from Lady Oracle
“إنّي أحبّك، وعندما أحسنُ إليك فإنّما أحسِن إلى نفسي.”
― Comtesse de Ségur, quote from Sophie's Misfortunes
“That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
(Sonnet 73 (1609))”
― William Shakespeare, quote from The Complete Sonnets and Poems
“Gray, wearing nothing but a Santa’s hat, a black one, with BDSM badass printed on it? You holding a Santa, please stop here sign next to your ass, all wide-eyed, expectant, and on your knees?” Jack”
― Jack L. Pyke, quote from Antidote
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.