Quote

All knowledge is local, all truth is partial. No truth can make another truth untrue. All knowledge is part of the whole knowledge. Once you have seen the larger pattern, you cannot go back to seeing the part as the whole.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Truth
Local
Part
Larger
Back
Patterns
Whole
Seen
Make
Seeing
Partial
Knowledge
Untrue
Another
Pattern
Cannot
Locals

More quotes by Ursula K. Le Guin

Image
Without war there are no heroes. What harm would that be? Oh, Lavinia, what a woman's question that is.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
A man who saw a miracle would reject his eyes' witness, if those with him saw nothing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn't taking place.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
To have a choice at all is to be privileged.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
The borderline between prose and poetry is one of those fog-shrouded literary minefields where the wary explorer gets blown to bits before ever seeing anything clearly. It is full of barbed wire and the stumps of dead opinions.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Is it the gods who set this fire in our hearts, or do we each make our fierce desire into a god?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the sun at sunset in autumn falls on the side of a certain plowland in the hills but what is the sense of giving a boundary to all that, of giving a name and ceasing to love where the name ceases to apply?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Excess is excrement, ... Excrement retained in the body is a poison.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
All times are changing times, but ours is one of massive, rapid moral and mental transformation. Archetypes turn into millstones, large simplicities get complicated, chaos becomes elegant, and what everybody knows is true turns out to be what some people used to think.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
To oppose something is to maintain it.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
We decided that it was no good asking what is the meaning of life, because life isn't an answer, life is the question, and you, yourself, are the answer.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
Love's just one of the ways through, and it can go wrong, and miss. Pain never misses. But therefore we don't have much choice about enduring it! We will, whether we want to or not.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
As a writer, you are free.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
If you evade suffering you also evade the chance of joy. Pleasure you may get, or pleasures, but you will not be fulfilled. You will not know what it is to come home.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Image
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin