Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. A profound love between two people involves, after all, the power and chance of doing profound hurt. The Left Hand of Darkness

2. Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

3. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

4. He said after a little while, 'I see why you say that only men do evil, I think. Even sharks are innocent, they kill because they must.' 'That is why nothing can resist us. Only one thing in the worl can resist an evil-hearted man. And that is another man. In our shame is our glory. Only our spirit, which is capable of evil, is capable of overcoming it. The Farthest Shore

5. I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child. . . . that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction

6. I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me. A Wizard of Earthsea

7. It is not only in dreams … that we find ourselves facing what is yet to be, in what was long forgotten, and speaking what seems nonsense because we will not see its meaning" - Sparrowhawk The Earthsea Quartet

8. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new. The Lathe of Heaven

9. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. The Wind's Twelve Quarters, Volume 1

10. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

11. Truth is a matter of the imagination. The Left Hand of Darkness

12. What good is power when you're too wise to use it? A Wizard of Earthsea

13. Belief is the wound that knowledge heals. The Telling

14. But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge. A Wizard of Earthsea

15. If a book were written all in numbers, it would be true. It would be just. Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together. But underneath the words, at the center, like the center of the Square, it all came out even. Everything could change, yet nothing would be lost. If you saw the numbers you could see that, the balance, the pattern. You saw the foundations of the world. And they were solid. The Dispossessed

16. Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new.

17. My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool; it gives me all the world and exiles me from it.

18. The history in the bookscreens, Earth History, that appalling record of injustice, cruelty, enslavement, hatred, murder — that record, justified and glorified by every government and institution, of waste and misuse of human life, animal life, plant life, the air, the water, the planet? If that is who we are, what hope for us? The Birthday of the World and Other Stories

19. The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. The Left Hand of Darkness

20. 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. If it were proven that there is no God there would be no religion. No Handdara, no Yomesh, no hearthgods, nothing. But also if it were proven that there is a God, there would be no religion. ... Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, unpredictable, inevitable -- the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?"That we shall die."Yes, There's really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer. ... The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. The Left Hand of Darkness

21. They argued because they liked argument, liked the swift run of the unfettered mind along the paths of possibility, liked to question what was not questioned. The Dispossessed

22. To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness. The Left Hand of Darkness

23. To light a candle is to cast a shadow... A Wizard of Earthsea

24. 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. No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters

25. When you stand at the edge of the desert, you think it can be broad. You think that crossing it can take a month at most. But two months pass, and three, and four, and every day means a step further in the dust. Gifts