Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “When the enemy enthusiastically embraces you, and the fellow countrymen bitterly reject you, it is hard not to wonder if you are, in fact, a traitor.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

302. “You can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

303. “The individual cannot bargain with the State. The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

304. “They think if people can possess enough things they will be content to live in prison. But I will not believe that. I want the walls down. I want solidarity, human solidarity.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

305. “For to keep dark the mind of the mageborn, that is a dangerous thing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

306. “Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

307. “What is the sense of giving a boundary to all... of giving it a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

308. “The writer Moe Bowstern gave me a slogan I cherish: “Subversion Through Friendliness.” It looks silly till you think about it. It bears considerable thinking about. Subversion through terror, shock, pain is easy – instant gratification, as it were.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

309. “And I needed a rock. Something to hold onto, to stand on. Something solid. Because everything was going soft, turning into mush, into marsh, into fog. Fog closing in on all sides. I didn’t know where I was at all.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

310. “When the genuine myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

311. “In the tale, in the telling, we are all one blood. Take the tale in your teeth, then, and bite till the blood runs, hoping it’s not poison; and we will all come to the end together, and even to the beginning: living, as we do, in the middle.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

312. “Do you realise,’ the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, ‘that they couldn’t even read Eggplant?’ And they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of Pike’s Peak.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

313. “For if it’s all the rest of us who are killed by the suicide, it’s himself whom the murderer kills; only he has to do is over, and over, and over.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

314. “A wrong that cannot be repaired must be transcended.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

315. “You have to help another person. But it’s not right to play God with masses of people. To be God you have to know what you’re doing. And to do any good at all, just believing you’re right and your motives are good isn’t enough.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

316. “I am offered the Grand Inquisitor’s choice. Will you choose freedom without happiness, or happiness without freedom? The only answer one can make, I think, is: No.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

317. “There is a certain bleakness in finding hope where one expected certainty.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

318. “I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills; but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

319. “I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

320. “It’s not a weapon or a woman can make a man, or magery either, or any power, anything but himself.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

321. “The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

322. “She had always known that all lives are in common, rejoicing in her kinship to the fish in the tanks of her laboratories, seeking the experience of existences outside the human boundary.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

323. “In diversity is life and where there’s life there’s hope, was the general sum of his creed, a modest one to be sure.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

324. “No matter how intelligent a man is, he can’t see what he doesn’t know how to see.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

325. “Realism is a very sophisticated form of literature, a very grown-up one. And that may be its weakness. But fantasy seems to be eternal and omnipresent and always attractive to kids.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

326. “He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safer for children to grow up in.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

327. “To light a candle is to cast a shadow...”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

328. “A rock is a good thing, too, you know. If the Isles of Earthsea were all made of diamond, we’d lead a hard life here. Enjoy the illusions, lad, and let the rocks be rocks.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

329. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

330. “Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

331. “The imagination is an essential tool of the mind, a fundamental way of thinking, an indispensable means of becoming and remaining human. We.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

332. “The important thing is not the finding, it is the seeking, it is the devotion with which one spins the wheel of prayer and scripture, discovering the truth little by little.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

333. “A person is defined solely by the extent of his influence over other people, by the sphere of his interrelationships; and morality is an utterly meaningless term unless defined as the good one does to others, the fulfilling of one’s function in the sociopolitical whole.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

334. “Our model of the cosmos must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics. It is not the answer we are after, but only how to ask the question.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

335. “The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained the vaster the appetite for more.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

336. “We’re in the world, not against it. It doesn’t work to try to stand outside things and run them, that way. It just doesn’t work, it goes against life. There is a way but you have to follow it. The world is, no matter how we think it ought to be. You have to be with it. You have to let it be.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

337. “Are there really people without resentment, without hate? she wondered. People who never go cross-grained to the universe? Who recognize evil, and resist evil, and yet are utterly unaffected by it? Of course there are. Countless, the living and the dead. Those who have returned in pure compassion to the wheel, those who follow the way that cannot be followed without knowing they follow it, the.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

338. “The wise needn’t ask, the fool asks in vain.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

339. “Alone, no one wins freedom.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

340. “Women are a very recent invention. I predate the invention of women by decades. Well, if you insist on pedantic accuracy, women have been invented several times in widely varying localities, but the inventors just didn’t know how to sell the product.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

341. “I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do. All that I might have been and couldn’t be. All the choices I didn’t make. All the things I lost and spent and wasted. I can give them back to the world. To the lives that haven’t been lived yet. That will be my gift back to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

342. “Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice – the power of change, the essential function of life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

343. “To die is to lose the self and rejoin the rest. He had kept himself, and lost the rest.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

344. “She couldn’t be a hero in the hero-tale sense. Not even in a fantasy? No. Because to me, fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

345. “Progress means nothing to presence.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

346. “The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

347. “Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

348. “I see life as a shared gift, received from others and passed on to others, living and dying as one process, in which lies both our suffering and our reward. Without mortality to purchase it, how can we have the consciousness of eternity? I think the price is worth paying.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

349. “And though I came to forget or regret all I have ever done, yet would I remember that once I saw the dragons aloft on the wind at sunset above the western isles; and I would be content.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

350. “We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!”

— Ursula K. Le Guin