It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of the journey over the destination.
Ursula K. Le Guin's quote highlights a vital perspective on life's experience; while having goals to aim for is important, the experiences and growth we encounter along the way hold greater significance. It suggests that the lessons learned, the challenges faced, and the moments lived during the journey shape our lives more profoundly than the final outcomes we achieve.
In practice
In a motivational speech about personal growth.
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.
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.
The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.
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.
When he found that the administrators were upset, he laughed. βDo they expect students not to be anarchists?β he said. βWhat else can the young be? When you are on the bottom, you must organize from the bottom up
The creative adult is the child who has survived.
We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.
That's the trouble with the world. We all despise ourselves.
Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'.
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.
I try not to speak about all the charities and people I help, because I believe we can only be truly generous when we expect nothing in return.
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