It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Avoiding suffering can lead to missing out on true fulfillment and joy.
This quote by Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes the intrinsic connection between suffering and joy. By avoiding pain and discomfort, one may also evade profound experiences that contribute to a deeper sense of fulfillment and a true sense of belonging or 'coming home'. It suggests that joy is often enriched by the understanding and acknowledgment of suffering.
Themes
SufferingJoyFulfillmentPainPleasure
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about emotional growth, one might say, 'As Ursula K. Le Guin noted, if you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy.'
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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