It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.
Interpretation
The destination is important, but the experiences and growth during the journey are what truly matter.
Ursula K. Le Guin's quote emphasizes that while having a goal or endpoint is valuable, it is the experiences, lessons, and personal development gained during the journey that hold greater significance. The process of striving toward a goal fosters growth and understanding, making the journey itself a crucial aspect of life.
In practice
In a graduation speech to inspire students to appreciate their educational journey.
It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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
I can never drive my car over a bridge without thinking of suicide. I can never look at a lake or an ocean without thinking of suicide.
The current operating system [culture] is flawed. It actually has bugs in it that generate contradictions. We're cutting the earth from beneath our own feet. We're poisoning the atmosphere that we breathe. This is not intelligent behaviour. This is a culture with a bug in its operating system that's making it produce erratic, dysfunctional, malfunctional behaviour. Time to call a tech! And who are the techs? The shamans are the techs.
Search men's governing principles, and consider the wise, what they shun and what they cleave to.
To live a disciplined life, and to accept the result of that discipline as the will of God - that is the mark of a man.
It was the upward-reaching and fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of Beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.
It is possible to demonstrate God's existence, although not a priori, yet a posteriori from some work of His more surely known to us.
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