Frank Herbert Quotes

The content of the ideal is a desire to return to the perfection of an imaginary past.

What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.

The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.

We all pine for a time in life when things were simpler. Even when they weren't necessarily simpler, hindsight makes them look a lot simpler. The reality of it was that it wasn't.

Nostalgia combines regularly with manifest respectability to give credence to old error as opposed to new truth.

We're captive on the carousel of time, we can't return we can only look behind.

We can heal. Perhaps we can return to that same place we once stood, when we were both young and innocent.

We have the bad habit, some of us, of looking back to a time - almost any time will do - when society was stable and orderly, family ties stronger and deeper, love more lasting and faithful, and so on. Let me be your Cassandra prophesying after the fact, and a long study of the documents in the case: it was never true, that is, no truer than it is now.

Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.

When we think of the past it's the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.

Kitsch evokes a future utopia looking back at a past that is selectively (mis)remembered, thereby helping to stabilize the present toward which kitsch is otherwise deeply anatagonistic.

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.

One may return to the place of his birth, He cannot go back to his youth.

There's a sort of romanticizing of the past. When you actually think about the past, you know it's a little different.

Everybody has a different idea of when those good old days were, but everyone is convinced that there was a time when literature really mattered and that it doesn't now. They also tend to believe that it really matters someplace else - in very improbable places often. Russia is someone's idea of a place where literature really counts.

Those who remember the past tend to get the story really screwed up.

Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.

Looking forward to going home, I was necessarily looking backward.

Music is...a form of remembering, a return to the seasons of the heart long gone.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.

How readily we wish time spent revoked, that we might try the ground again where once--through inexperience, as we now perceive--we missed that happiness we might have found!

The scenes and events of long ago, and the persons who took part in them, wear a charming aspect to the eye of memory, which sees only the outlines and takes no note of disagreeable details. The present enjoys no such advantage, and so it always seems defective.

Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.