Sam > Sam's Quotes

“As was the custom in such cases, the pear tree was charged with murder and sentenced to be uprooted and burned.”
― Robert Graves

“Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“The present is the past rolled up for action, and the past is the present unrolled for understanding”
― Will Durant, The Lessons of History

“The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. 21.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do.

Self-indulgence means tying it to the things that happen to you.

Sanity means tying it to your own actions.”
― Marcus Aurelius

“We fear things in proportion to our ignorance of them.”
― Titus Livius (Livy)

“It is pleasant, when the sea is high and the winds are dashing the waves about, to watch from the shores the struggles of another.”
― Livy

“Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.”
― Titus Livius

“The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see: and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.”
― Livy , The History of Rome, Books 1-5: The Early History of Rome

“Men are slower to recognise blessings than misfortunes.”
― Livy

“So difficult is it to observe moderation in the defence of liberty, while each man under the presence of equality raises himself only by keeping others down, and by their very precautions against fear men make themselves feared, and in repelling injury from ourselves we inflict it on others as though there were no alternative between doing wrong and suffering it.”
― Titus Livy, History of Rome

“Of late years wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every kind of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death both individual and collective”
― Livy

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”
― Mark Twain

“A lonely, quiet person has observations and experiences that are at once both more indistinct and more penetrating than those of one more gregarious; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. . . . Loneliness fosters that which is original, daringly and bewilderingly beautiful, poetic. But loneliness also fosters that which is perverse, incongruous, absurd, forbidden.”
― Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

“Truth suffers from too much analysis.

-Ancient Fremen Saying”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“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 truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

“Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of bureaucratic aristocracies. Of course, all bureaucracies follow this pattern, but what a hypocrisy to find this even under a communized banner. Ahhh, well, if patterns teach me anything it’s that patterns are repeated. My oppressions, by and large, are no worse than any of the others and, at least, I teach a new lesson.   —”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

“The gift of words is the gift of deception and illusion.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“Nature does not make mistakes. Right and wrong are human categories.”
― 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.

-Words of Muad'dib by Princess Irulan.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“Here lies a toppled god.
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah

“The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind.”
― Frank Herbert, Dune

“Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering mistakes. Real boats rock.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

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

“What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there’s the real danger.”
― Frank Herbert

“What does a mirror look at?”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.”
― Frank Herbert