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The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one's true identity in both.

Ursula K. Le Guin

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Ursula K. Le Guin
Age: 88 †
Born: 1929
Born: October 21
Died: 2018
Died: January 22
Author
Feminist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Poet
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Berkeley
California
Ursula Kroeber
Ursula Kroeber Le Guin
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More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

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The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.
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There is a limited number of plots. There is no limit to the number of stories.
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What you love, you will love. What you undertake you will complete. You are a fulfiller of hope you are to be relied on. But seventeen years give little armor against despair...Consider, Arren. To refuse death is to refuse life.
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Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.
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Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art.
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Fiction—and poetry and drama— cleanse the doors of perception.
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The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.
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Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.
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No society can change the nature of existence. We can't prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering, unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Belief in heaven and hell is a big deal in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and some forms of doctrinaire Buddhism. For the rest of us it's simply meaningless. We don't live in order to die, we live in order to live.
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People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by dragons. From within.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Wrongs done could not be righted, but at least they were not still being done.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Animals do neither good nor evil. They do as they must do.We may call what they do harmful or useful, but good and evil belong to us, who chose to choose what we do. [. . .] The animals need only be and do.We're yoked, and they're free. So to be with an animal is to know a little freedom.
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If I had to pick a hero, it would be Charles Darwin--the size of his mind, which included all that scientific curiosity and knowledge seeking, and the ability to put it all together. There is a genuine spirituality about Darwin's thinking.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Can true function arise from basic dysfunction?
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward towards the light but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people.
Ursula K. Le Guin
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I do not care what comes after I have seen the dragons on the wind of morning.
Ursula K. Le Guin