Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of words and language within cultural development.
Wole Soyinka reflects on his upbringing in an environment where language and communication were foundational to cultural identity and understanding. This statement highlights the significance of words not just as tools for communication, but as vital components that shape culture, knowledge, and human connections.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of language in education.
Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.
A war, with its attendant human suffering, must, when that evil is unavoidable, be made to fragment more than buildings: It must shatter the foundations of thought and re-create. Only in this way does every individual share in the cataclysm and understand the purpose of sacrifice.
Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.
I have a kind of magnetic attraction to situations of violence.
Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.
We can say with some assurance that, although children may be the victims of fate, they will not be the victims of our neglect.
To aid life, leaving it free, however, that is the basic task of the educator.
Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments β and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.
Academia does not provide many opportunities for immediate gratification. You work for two years on a project, it takes two more years to get it published, and then you start hoping someone might read it.
Our schools and colleges are turning out people who cannot feel fulfilled unless they are telling other people what to do.
You can get so well educated in America that your thoughts become detached from common sense. You can get so complicated in your thinking that the obvious isn't real to you anymore.
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