Manhood is patience. Mastery is nine time patience

Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

If the foreman had no experience in bossing a mob, they had no experience in being one. Members of a community, not elements of a collectivity, they were not moved by mass feeling; there were...

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...

To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.

Orr slept. He dreamed. There was no rub.

A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you.

Belief in the lie is the life of the lie.

The king was pregnant.

It’s a queer business, making oneself blind.

It is our suffering that brings us together. It is not love. Love does not obey the mind, and turns to hate when forced. The bond that binds us is beyond choice. We are brothers....

To me the ”female principle” is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs...

I wondered, not for the first time, what patriotism is, what the love of country truly consists of, how that yearning loyalty that had shaken my friend’s voice arises: and how so real a love...

I think,” Tehanu said in her soft, strange voice, “that when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live. I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do....

I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved...

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I...

I want to say to the literature teacher who remains wilfully, even boastfully ignorant of a major element of contemporary fiction: you are incompetent to teach or judge your subject. Readers and students who do...

Many people would have to hang by their teeth from a frayed cord suspended by a paper clip from a leaking hot air balloon over the Grand Canyon in order to feel what I feel...

I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.

The unknown…the unforetold, the unproven, that is what life is based on. Ignorance is the ground of thought…The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our...

Judgement is poverty.

I use a whole lot of half-assed semicolons; there was one of them just now; that was a semicolon after ‘semicolons,’ and another one after ‘now.

How does one hate a country, or love one? Tibe talks about it; I lack the trick of it. I know people, I know towns, farms, hills and rivers and rocks, I know how the...

You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.

It is very hard for evil to take hold of the unconsenting soul.

I’ll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When that...

You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.

It had never occurred to me before that music and thinking are so much alike. In fact you could say music is another way of thinking, or maybe thinking is another kind of music.

Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying. The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the...

Gradually the healing took place, seeming as it always does that it wasn’t taking place.

Belief is the wound that knowledge heals.

…you play the instrument you have.

I know perfectly well he’s a god, too. But what I think is he’ll be much godlier after he’s dead.

…You have knowledge, and I have skill, and between us we have…””We have the Ring of Erreth-Akbe.””Yes, that. But I thought also of another thing between us. Call it trust… That is one of its...

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future – indeed Schrödinger most famous thought experiment goes to show that the “future,” on...

«I am tired,» he said. «I did a lot today. That is, I did something. The only thing I have ever done. I pressed a button. It took the entire will power, the accumulated strength...

We have nothing but our freedom. We have nothing to give you but your own freedom. We have no law but the single principle of mutual aid between individuals. We have no government but the...

Legends of prediction are common throughout the whole Household of Man. Gods speak, spirits speak, computers speak. Oracular ambiguity or statistical probability provides loopholes, and discrepancies are expunged by Faith.

The light is the left hand of darkness

She’ll die.’ ‘Aye. That’s a consequence of being alive.

But it doesn’t take a thousand men to open a door, my lord.””It might to keep it open.

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.

Oh, Hank,” Susan whispered, “their wings are furry.””Oh, James,” Harriet whispered, “their hands are kind.

To see that your life is a story while you’re in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well.

It is yin and yang. Light is the left hand of darkness… how did it go? Light, dark. Fear, courage. Cold, warmth. Female, male. It is yourself, Therem. Both and one. A shadow on snow.

Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

They have nothing to give. They have no power of making. All their power is to darken and destroy. They cannot leave this place; they are this place; and it should be left to them....

Age and illness made one a dualist