H-You > H-You's Quotes

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The mystery of life isn't a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“She thought of the boy's features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns-endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles,
Victim of your folly.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Give as few orders as possible," his father had told him once long ago. "Once you've given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“As no two people see the world the same way, all trips from here to there are imaginary; all truth is a tale I am telling myself.”
― Brion Gysin, The Process: Beat-Era Mysticism and Madness in the Sands of North Africa

“He is a man like any other… he will become what he will become, out of the force of his person and the accident of his fate.”
― John Williams, Augustus

“Fear is stronger than love, remember that. Fear is stronger than love, all that love I gave didn't mean nothing when it came to fear.”
― Tupac Shakur

“We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.”
― Philip Larkin, High Windows

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.”
― John Ruskin, Modern Painters: Volume 3. Of Many Things

“He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”
― Adam Smith