It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
In our loss and fear we craved the acts of religion, the ceremonies that allow us to admit our helplessness, our dependence on the great forces we do not understand.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the human desire for connection to something greater during times of loss and fear.
Ursula K. Le Guin's quote emphasizes how in moments of vulnerability, such as during loss and fear, people often turn to religious practices and rituals. These ceremonies serve as a way for individuals to acknowledge their own helplessness and recognize their dependence on larger, often incomprehensible forces that govern existence, promoting a sense of community and support in shared experiences.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about the role of religion in coping with grief during a community meeting.
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 know how young black men are seen. They're boys - scared little boys, oftentimes. I was one of them. I was completely afraid of the Los Angeles Police Department.
To be born in India is to arrive into the world swimming in religion.
Then he [The Star Child] waited, marshaling his thoughts and brooding over his still untested powers. For though he was master of the world, he was not quite sure what to do next. But he would think of something.
[about tabloid magazines] Just because you read it in a magazine or see it on a TV screen doesn't make it factual. To buy it is to feed it.
At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles.
Anarcho-syndic alism took for granted that working people ought to control their own work, its conditions, the enterprises in which they work, along with communities, so they should be associated with one another in free associations, and democracy of that kind should be the foundational elements of a more general free society.
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