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.
The Way is eternal. Until your last day, you are free from peril.
The moon is a loyal companion._x000D_ It never leaves. Itβs always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day itβs a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human._x000D_ Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.
Every call to worship is a call into the Real World.... I encounter such constant and widespread lying about reality each day and meet with such skilled and systematic distortion of the truth that I'm always in danger of losing my grip on reality. The reality, of course, is that God is sovereign and Christ is savior. The reality is that prayer is my mother tongue and the eucharist my basic food. The reality is that baptism, not Myers-Briggs, defines who I am.
This, in fact, is the power of the imagination, which, combining the memory of gold with that of the mountain, can compose the idea of a golden mountain.
Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day: civility, respect, kindness, character.
So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.