It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
Ursula K. Le GuinRead
To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.
Interpretation
Being true to oneself is both uncommon and valuable.
The quote by Ursula K. Le Guin highlights the importance of authenticity in a world where people often conform to societal expectations. To 'be oneself' signifies embracing one's unique identity, thoughts, and feelings, which is a rare quality that brings depth and richness to human experience.
In practice
During a leadership seminar, when discussing personal integrity.
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
But people who long to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many foolish desires and schemes that plunge them into ruin and destruction. For love of money is the root of all of evil and some having pursued its power, fall from faith and end in sorrow.
Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?
For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.
All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
No charter of freedom will be worth looking at which does not ensure the same measure of freedom for the minorities as for the majority.
You can look at the words on this paper and, because they are the ones I am used to choosing, they will show you the shape of me. I am here to be read in the way you might read the impression of my weight in a bed after a still night, a restless night, a night not alone.
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