It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
All knowledge is partial, infinitesimally partial. Reason is a net thrown out into an ocean. What truth it brings in is a fragment, a glimpse, a scintillation of the whole truth.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Knowledge is limited and only reveals a small part of reality.
In this quote, Ursula K. Le Guin emphasizes the limitations of human understanding and knowledge. She uses the metaphor of reason as a fishing net cast into the vast ocean of truth, suggesting that although we may capture some insights, they are merely fragments of a much larger and more complex reality that we have yet to grasp fully.
Themes
KnowledgeTruthWisdomUnderstandingPhilosophy
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the limitations of human perception, this quote serves as a reminder that our knowledge is always incomplete.
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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