Ursula K. Le Guin on Mind

"Between thought and spoken word is a gap where intention can enter, the symbol twisted aside, and the lie come to be."

"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."

"The world’s vast and strange, Hara, but no vaster and no stranger than our minds are. Think of that sometimes."

"I thought, shivering, that there are things that outweigh comfort, unless one is an old woman or a cat."

"Mr. Ai, we’ve seen the same events with different eyes; I wrongly thought they’d seem the same to us."

"There’s seldom as much hurry as I used to think there was."

"Uninfluenced by others, he never knew he influenced them; he had no idea they liked him."

"The juniper-scented liquor had volatilized his thoughts; he should be thinking that madness caused this man to call himself a king, but was thinking rather that kingship had driven this man mad."

"With the myth of the State out of the way, the real mutuality and reciprocity of society and individual became clear. Sacrifice might be demanded of the individual, but never compromise: for though only the society could give security and stability, only the individual, the person, had the power of moral choice—the power of change, the essential function of life. The Odonian society was conceived as a permanent revolution, and revolution begins in the thinking mind."

"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."

"He looked at the machine, its cabinets all standing open; it should be destroyed, he thought. But he had no idea how to do it, nor any will to try. Destruction was not his line; and a machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own."

"A great deal of her obscurity and cant, Tenar had begun to realize, was mere ineptness with words and ideas. Nobody had ever taught her to think consecutively. Nobody had ever listened to what she said. All that was expected, all that was wanted of her was muddle, mystery, mumbling. She was a witchwoman. She had nothing to do with clear meaning."