Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “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

302. “And I speak of spiritual suffering! Of people seeing their talent, their work, their lives wasted. Of good minds submitting to stupid ones. Of strength and courage strangled by envy, greed for power, fear of change. Change is freedom, change is life.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

303. “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

304. “Her work, I really think her work is finding what her real work is and doing it, her work, her own work, her being human, her being in the world.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

305. “But now his dry and silent grieving for his lost wife must end, for there she stood, the fierce, recalcitrant, and fragile stranger, forever to be won again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

307. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

309. “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

310. “Darkness is only in the mortal eye, that thinks it sees, but sees not.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

311. “Now perhaps an excessive dread of overpopulation – overcrowding – reflects not an outward reality, but an inward state of mind. If you feel overcrowded when you’re not, what does that mean? Maybe that you’re afraid of human contact – of being close to people, of being touched.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

312. “I’d rather get bad news from an honest man than lies from a flatterer.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

313. “His gentleness was uncompromising; because he would not compete for dominance, he was indomitable.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

314. “To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

315. “Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number – Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don’t look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysis, every now and then.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

316. “If your voice is heard by more people because you’ve earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

317. “It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

318. “Hold fast to the one noble thing.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

319. “The infinite possibility, the unlimited and unqualified wholeness of being of the uncommitted, the nonacting, the uncarved; the being who, being nothing but himself, is everything.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

320. “The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

321. “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

322. “If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don’t marry and have kids, and above all, don’t die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

323. “As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

324. “Would you really like to live in a society where you have no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go live in a prison?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

325. “What the brain does by itself is infinitely more fascinating and complex than any response it can make to chemical stimulation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

326. “She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It’s the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

327. “Old Age Is Not for the Young.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

328. “If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin – the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin’s thinking.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

329. “Elegance is a small price to pay for enlightenment, and I was glad to pay it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

330. “What is more arrogant than honesty?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

331. “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

332. “But the death of a great mage, who has many times in his life walked on the dry steep hillsides of death’s kingdom, is a strange matter: for the dying man goes not blindly, but surely, knowing the way.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

333. “Let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy; it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

334. “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

335. “To know there is a choice is to have to make the choice: change or stay: river or rock.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

336. “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

337. “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

338. “The unknown,” said Faxe’s soft voice in the forest, “the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought. Unproof is the ground of action.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

339. “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

340. “Genre fiction was looked at as a ghetto, but I wonder now if realist fiction, sealing itself off in the glum suburbs of a dysfunctional society, denying the use of imagination, was the ghetto.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

341. “In a State, even a democracy, where power is hierarchic, how can you prevent the storage of information from becoming yet another source of power to the powerful – another piston in the great machine?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

342. “Life in the auntring, or for a settled man, is repetitive, as I said; and so it can be dull. Nothing new happens. The mind always wants new happenings.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

343. “Life rises out of death, death rises out of life, in being opposite they yearn to each other, they give birth to each other and are forever reborn. And with them all is reborn, the flower of the apple tree, the light of the stars.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

344. “I’ll die, you’ll die; how could we love each other otherwise? The sun’s going to burn out, what else keeps it shining?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

345. “What it made me think about above all is how incredibly much we learn from our birthday to last day – from where the horsies live to the origin of the stars. How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

346. “For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

347. “There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is ‘superior’ to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

348. “Endurance may outlast hope.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

349. “The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

350. “There is no kingdom like the forests.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin