A Quote by Ursula K. Le Guin

It is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception and compassion and hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Quote Topics

Hope Imagination Above Achieve Compassion Perception

Quote Author

Ursula K. Le Guin
American - Novelist
October 21, 1929 - January 22, 2018

As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Imagination is no longer conceived as simplistically opposed to perception and reason; rather, perception and reason are recognised as being always informed by the imagination.

Richard Tarnas

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?

Wendell Berry

Live with compassion. Work with compassion. Die with compassion. Meditate with compassion. Enjoy with compassion. When problems come, experience them with compassion.

Thubten Zopa Rinpoche

Some things have eternal value, and compassion is one of them. I hope we never lose that. Compassion for humans as well as animals.

Arthur C. Clarke

Compassion is an alternate perception

Mary Caroline Richards

Perception without the word, which is without thought, is one of the strangest phenomena. Then the perception is much more acute, not only with the brain, but also with all the senses. Such perception is not the fragmentary perception of the intellect nor the affair of the emotions. It can be called a total perception, and it is part of meditation.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

To possess both wisdom and compassion is the heart of our human revolution. If you have wisdom alone and lack compassion, it will be a cold, perverse wisdom. If you have compassion alone and lack wisdom, you cannot give happiness to others. You are even likely to lead them in the wrong direction, and you won't be able to achieve your own happiness.

Daisaku Ikeda

In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes- courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, and so on - can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion, even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.

Eric Hoffer

There is a common perception that compassion is, if not actually an impediment, at least irrelevant to professional life. Personally, I would argue that not only is it relevant, but that when compassion is lacking, our activities are in danger of becoming destructive. This is because when we ignore the question of the impact our actions have on others' well-being, inevitably we end up hurting them.

Dalai Lama

I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it. I would hope to act with compassion without thinking of personal gain.

Thomas Aquinas

In its sentimental mode, compassion is an exercise in moral indignation, in feeling good rather than doing good ... In its unsentimental mode, compassion seeks above all to do good.

Gertrude Himmelfarb

Imagination is a sort of faint perception.

Aristotle

Imagination helps you to recognize the reality of facts, but then to go beyond them, to penetrate beneath them, to rise above them in your search for creative answers to problems. Imagination "stirs up the gift of God in thee." Through your imagination you touch and express the inspiration of the Infinite. Imagination, in the words of Shakespeare, "gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name." You reach into the heavens to grasp an idea, then you bring it down to earth and make it work.