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.
There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls.
Theology moves back and forth between two poles, the eternal truth of its foundations and the temporal situation in which the eternal truth must be received.
Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are as sand, as dust - or less than dust - in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing.
The real question today is not when human life begins, but, what is the value of human life? The abortionist who reassembles the arms and legs of a tiny baby to make sure all its parts have been torn from its mother's body can hardly doubt whether it is a human being. The real question for him and for all of us is whether that tiny human life has a God-given right to be protected by the law - the same right we have.
St. Paul introduced an entirely novel view of marriage, that it existed primarily to prevent the sin of fornication. It is just as if one were to maintain that the sole reason for baking bread is to prevent people from stealing cake.
The swiftness of time is infinite, as is still more evident when we look back on the past.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.