Ursula K. Le Guin Quotes
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.
Quotes to Explore
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The truth doesn't hurt unless it ought to.
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When distant and unfamiliar and complex things are communicated to great masses of people, the truth suffers a considerable and often a radical distortion. The complex is made over into the simple, the hypothetical into the dogmatic, and the relative into an absolute.
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Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.
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There never yet has been a country which became powerful without knowledge. A man by his own strength alone cannot successfully combat a tiger, but by his intelligence, he can devise means to entrap him.
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Because I spent many years during my previous life as an academic researching game theory, some commentators rushed to presume that as Greece's new finance minister, I was busily devising bluffs, stratagems and outside options, struggling to improve upon a weak hand. Nothing could be further from the truth.
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The research I have been doing - studying how foodstuffs yield energy in living cells - does not lead to the kind of knowledge that can be expected to give immediate practical benefits to mankind. If I have chosen this field of study, it was because I believed in its importance in spite of its theoretical character.
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It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.
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We need a NASA-like organization for ocean exploration, because we need to be exploring and protecting our life support systems here on Earth.
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I like the lasso of truth. There is something so beautiful about the fact that people have to tell the truth when they have the lasso around them. And it's not too violent.
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Truly, love is delightful and pleasant food, supplying, as it does, rest to the weary, strength to the weak, and joy to the sorrowful. It in fact renders the yoke of truth easy and its burden light.
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The truth is, I've been going pretty much nuts all year. I constantly have to fight being scattered. I feel like I'm on automatic pilot from fatigue. The hardest thing is trying to be present, living for the moment, for everybody in the family.
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I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.
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As instruments for knowing the objects, the sense organs are outside, and so they are called outer senses; and the mind is called the inner sense because it is inside. But the distinction between inner and outer is only with reference to the body; in truth, there is neither inner nor outer. The mind's nature is to remain pure like ether.
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We know about the socially complex lives of elephants: how they communicate, how they bond, how they even seem to grieve. We have ethologists in the field and activists on the ground to thank for that knowledge.
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Being able to breathe underwater would be sweet. There is so much life underneath the water that we don't know about. I would love to check out the bottom of the ocean to see what's going on down there.
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One of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean.
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Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
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The 'Dog's Purpose' premise has gotten me so many emails and comments from people who say that their dog is so much like one they had when they were young or years before, that it seems like the truth. The idea that you would come across an old friend later in life.
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In truth, the only restrictions on our capacity to astonish ourselves and each other are imposed by our own minds.
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If wealth is your hope for independence you will never have it. The only real security that a man will have in this world is a reserve of knowledge, experience, and ability.
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I like Ryan Gosling from the inside. I think he's a beautiful person, and then if you didn't have anything, I'd still be his friend.
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To live alone one must be an animal or a god - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher.
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One of the great secrets of the day is to know how to take possession of popular prejudices and passions, in such a way as to introduce a confusion of principles which makes impossible all understanding between those who speak the same language and have the same interests.
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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.
