Top 500 Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

406. “Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

407. “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

408. “All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

412. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

419. “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

420. “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

421. “What is more arrogant than honesty?”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “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

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Featured in: Real Quotes

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

437. “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

438. “A lot of snow out of one cloud, and it grows thicker.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

439. “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

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

441. “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

442. “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

443. “Part of the particular interest and beauty of science fiction and fantasy: writer and reader collaborate in world-making.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

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

— Ursula K. Le Guin

445. “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

446. “It is hard, I found, to be called traitor. Strange how hard it is, for it’s an easy name to call another man.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

447. “So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

448. “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

449. “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

450. “I was with you at the beginning of your journey. It is right that I should follow you to its end.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin