A.P. Herbert 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.

Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.

The Fremen were supreme in that quality the ancients called "spannungsbogen" -- which is the self-imposed delay between desire for a thing and the act of reaching out to grasp that thing.

There are many things to resist, but disease is not one of them.

An act of God was defined as something which no reasonable man could have expected.

A visitor from Mars could easily pick out the civilized nations. They have the best implements of war.

The thing I enjoyed most were visits from children. They did not want public office.

People are beginning to see that the first requisite to success in life is to be a good animal.

A jury is composed of twelve men of average ignorance.

I thank You Lord for creating the world beautiful and various and if this is Your seduction I am seduced for good and past all forgiveness

Who is the honest man? He that doth still and strongly good pursue To God, his neighbor, and himself most true: Whom neither force nor fawning can Unpin, or wrench from giving all their due.

In a long journey straw waighs.

A dwarf on a giant's shoulder, sees further of the two.

Drink not the third glass, which thou canst not tame, when once it is within thee.

Good horses make short miles.

Cynicism is the humor of hatred.

He is an old bore. Even the grave yawns for him.

The task of the historian is to understand the peoples of the past better than they understand themselves.

The national school is not a lecture hall or a library. Its schooling consists chiefly in experimental collective action aimed at the realization of a collective purpose.

Confession without repentance is just bragging.

Thursday come, and the week's gone.

National character cannot be built by law. It is the sum of the moral fiber of its individuals.

Next to prayer, Fishing is the most personal relationship of man.

People think the FDA is protecting them -- it isn't. What the FDA is doing, and what people think it's doing, are as different as night and day.

Praise the Sea, but keepe on land.

Old age is not a time of life. It is a condition of the body. It is not time that ages the body, it is abuse that does.

Never was a miser a brave soul.

Gifts enter every where without a wimble.

By all means use sometimes to be alone.

It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.

I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind.

Something cannot emerge from nothing.

There's a lesson in every temptation.

Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species.

To come under siege was the inevitable fate of power.

What I do deny is that you can build any enduring society without some such mystical ethos.

Historians exercise great power and some of them know it. They recreate the past, changing it to fit their own interpretations. Thus, they change the future as well.

Words themselves were the ultimate barrier to revelation.

The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.

Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.

Answers are a perilous grip on the universe. They can appear sensible yet explain nothing.

An argument fatal to the communist theory, is suggested by the fact, that a desire for property is one of the elements of our nature.

The child takes most of his nature of the mother, besides speech, manners, and inclination.

Aggression which is flagitious when committed by one, is not sanctioned when committed by a host.

The primary use of knowledge is for such guidance of conduct under all circumstances as shall make living complete. All other uses of knowledge are secondary.

Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious.

Each life creates endless ripples.

Liberty is not the right of one, but of all.

Noiseless falls the foot of time That only treads on flowers.

If enough of us believe, a new thing can be made to exist. Belief structure creates a filter through which chaos is sifted into order.