A Wizard of Earthsea (Earthsea Cycle, #1)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

But need alone is not enough to set power free: there must be knowledge.

Have you never thought how danger must surround power as shadow does light?

But you must not change one thing, one pebble, one grain of sand, until you know what good and evil will follow on that act. The world is in balance, in Equilibrium. A wizard’s power of Changing and of Summoning can shake the balance of the world. It is dangerous, that power. It is most perilous. It must follow knowledge, and serve need. To light a candle is to cast a shadow . . .”

For magic consists in this, the true naming of a thing.

Ged stood still a while, like one who has received great news, and must enlarge his spirit to receive it.

And the truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do . . .”

From that time forth he believed that the wise man is one who never sets himself apart from other living things, whether they have speech or not, and in later years he strove long to learn what can be learned, in silence, from the eyes of animals, the flight of birds, the great slow gestures of trees.

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

“For a word to be spoken,” Ged answered slowly, “there must be silence. Before, and after.”

And he began to see the truth, that Ged had neither lost nor won but, naming the shadow of his death with his own name, had made himself whole: a man: who, knowing his whole true self, cannot be used or possessed by any power other than himself, and whose life therefore is lived for life’s sake and never in the service of ruin, or pain, or hatred, or the dark.

“Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.”