It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Helping others is essential, but one must recognize the limits of their authority and understanding.
Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes the importance of helping others while also cautioning against the arrogance that can come from believing one has all the answers. She suggests that genuine assistance requires not only good intentions but also a clarity of understanding and the awareness of the complexity of human needs, reminding us that true guidance should not come from a place of superiority or presumption.
Themes
Helping OthersAuthorityUnderstandingGood Intentions
In practice
Example use cases
During a community meeting about social services, this quote could be used to highlight the importance of careful consideration when offering help.
More from Ursula K. Le Guin
All quotes →In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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 GuinRead
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. “Do they expect students not to be anarchists?” he said. “What else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
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