Frank Herbert Quotes

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

The truth is the truth. What changes is what we know about it and what we're willing to believe.

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

A belief may be larger than a fact.

There is a distinction between fact and truth. Truth has an element of revelation about it. If something is true, it does more than strike one as merely being so.

We can't assume what we don't believe.

Belief is nearly the whole of the universe whether based on truth or not.

Without knowing the Knower, all the knowledge that one gathers cannot be valid.

There are, in effect, two things, to know and to believe one knows; to know is science; to believe one knows is ignorance.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

The things of which we want the proof are those we know the best.

All our knowledge originates in opinion.

Certainty, not data, is knowledge.

If you have it and you know you have it, then you have it. If you have it and don't know you have it, you don't have it. If you don't have it but you think you have it, then you have it.

I always divide people into two groups. Those who live by what they know to be a lie, and those who live by what they believe, falsely, to be the truth.

Science is nothing but perception.

There are no eternal facts, as there are no absolute truths.

People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that which they love is true.

I often wish... that I could rid the world of the tyranny of facts. What are facts but compromises? A fact merely marks the point where we have agreed to let investigation cease.

There's nothing you can know that isn't known.

A search for truth seems to me to be full of pitfalls. We all have different understandings of what truth is, and we'll each believe - or we are in danger of each believing - that our truth is the one and only absolute truth, which is why I say it's full of pitfalls.

Everything is but what we think it.

The first lesson about trusting your senses is: don't. Just because you believe something to be true, just because you know it's true, that doesn't mean it is true.