Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “She obeys me, but only because she wants to. It’s the only justification for obedience, Ged observed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

403. “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

404. “Primitiveness and civilization are degrees of the same thing. If civilization has an opposite, it is war.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

405. “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

406. “Only what is mortal bears life, Arren. Only in death is there rebirth. The Balance is not a stillness. it is a movement – an eternal becoming.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

407. “Reason is a faculty far larger than mere objective force. When either the political or the scientific discourse announces itself as the voice of reason, it is playing God, and should be spanked and stood in the corner.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

408. “We scarcely know how much of our pleasure and interest in life comes to us through our eyes until we have to do without them; and part of that pleasure is that the eyes can choose where to look. But the ears can’t choose where to listen.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

409. “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

410. “The daily routine of most adults is so heavy and artificial that we are closed off to much of the world. We have to do this in order to get our work done. I think one purpose of art is to get us out of those routines. When we hear music or poetry or stories, the world opens up again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

411. “To break a rule you have to know the rule. A blunder is not a revolution.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

412. “What is more arrogant than honesty?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

413. “If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

414. “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

415. “The poet Roethke said, “I learn by going where I have to go.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

416. “The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

417. “Outside the locked room is the landscape of time, in which the spirit may, with luck and courage, construct the fragile, makeshift, improbable roads and cities of fidelity: a landscape inhabitable by human beings.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

418. “Honorifics and meaningless ritual phrases of greeting, leave-taking, permission-asking, and false gratitude, please, thank you, you’re welcome, goodbye, fossil relics of primitive hypocrisy – all were stumbling blocks to truthfulness between producer-consumers.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

419. “When in the Land of Property think like a propertarian. Dress like one, eat like one, act like one, be one.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

420. “The interplay of the aesthetic with the erotic is complex. The peacock’s tail is beautiful to us, sexy to the peahen. Beauty and sexual attractiveness overlap, coincide. They may be deeply related. I think they should not be confused.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

421. “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

422. “It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Real Quotes

423. “Our border now is no line between two hills, but the line our planet makes in circling the Sun.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

425. “The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. It is the truth. We have that on good authority.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

426. “Anyhow they’re always exceptions. But most women, their only relationship to a man is having. Either owning or being owned.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

427. “To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

428. “Being an irreligious puritan and a rational mystic, I think it’s irresponsible to let a belief think for you or a chemical dream for you.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

429. “Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

430. “If memory remains sound and the thinking mind retains its vigor, an old intelligence may have extraordinary breadth and depth of understanding.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

431. “Suffering is dysfunctional, except as a bodily warning against danger. Psychologically and socially it’s merely destructive.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

432. “To believe that our beliefs are permanent truths which encompass reality is a sad arrogance. To let go of that belief is to find safety.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

433. “Where, then, is Truth?” declaimed Bedap, and yawned. “In the hill one happens to be sitting on,” said Tirin.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

434. “How can people be anything but ignorant when knowledge isn’t saved, isn’t taught?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

435. “We weren’t cruel, we were ignorant, foolish. Children are ignorant and foolish. But they learn. If they are given a chance to learn.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

436. “No man, no power, can bind the action of wizardry or still the words of power. For they are the very words of Making, and one who could silence them could unmake the world.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

437. “What is his purpose, then?” “I don’t know. Things don’t have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What’s the function of a galaxy? I don’t know if our life has a purpose and I don’t see that it matters. What does matter is that we’re a part.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

438. “We of Es Toch tell a little myth, which says that in the beginning the Creator told a great lie. For there was nothing at all, but the Creator spoke, saying, It exists. And behold, in order that the lie of God might be God’s truth, the universe at once began to exist.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

439. “I doubt that the imagination can be suppressed. If you truly eradicated it in a child, he would grow up to be an eggplant.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

440. “In other ways my story didn’t follow the tradition. Its subversive elements attracted little attention, no doubt because I was deliberately sneaky about them. A great many white readers in 1967 were not ready to accept a brown-skinned hero. But they weren’t expecting one. I didn’t make an issue of it, and you have to be well into the book before you realize that Ged, like most of the characters, isn’t white.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

441. “The prisoner is the jailer’s jailer.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

442. “There is no information about corporations. There is only disinformation.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

443. “A man would know the end he goes to, but he cannot know it if he does not turn, and return to his beginning, and hold that beginning in his being.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

444. “Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

445. “The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

446. “Had his fear, in fact, been the personal fear that Selver might having learnt the racial hatred, reject him and treat him not as you but as one of them.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

447. “Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

448. “Which is better off, a lizard basking in the sun or a philosopher?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

449. “You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes – the walls, the walls!”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

450. “Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun’s first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin