It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Books help us explore our identity and understand ourselves through the experiences of others.
This quote by Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes the role of literature in personal development and self-discovery. By engaging with the thoughts, feelings, and actions of characters—whether real or imagined—we gain insight into our own identities and potentials. Books serve as a mirror, reflecting our inner selves and guiding us in shaping who we might become.
Themes
BooksIdentitySelf-DiscoveryUnderstandingLiterature
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about personal growth, one could quote this to highlight the importance of reading.
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
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
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
Similar quotes
Children are coming to school with trauma, everyday trauma, that they live under: violence in the homes, alcoholism in the community, unemployment thats 80 percent, not just during the recession. We need to help treat that before they can even go sit in a class and learn about math.
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If I can get a story about a player, I would give you a ship load of numbers, batting averages and all just for that one precious story. That's the kind of thing that I love to do.
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Though the academic authorities are actually proud of conducting everything by means of Examinations, they seldom indulge in what religious people used to descibe as Self-Examination. The consequence is that the modern State has educated its citizens in a series of ephemeral fads.
Gilbert K. ChestertonRead
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.
Margaret AtwoodRead
America thrived in the 20th century because we made high school free. We sent a generation to college. We cultivated the most educated workforce in the world.
Barack ObamaRead
The great thing about working out at a gym is that if you put in effort, you get very obvious results. The same should be true of college. A professor’s job is to teach students how to see their minds growing in the same way they can see their muscles grow when they look in a mirror.
Randy PauschRead