In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that people often equate true value with love and wealth, but emphasizes the lasting nature of love over the fleeting pursuit of wealth.
Mark Kurlansky's quote reflects on the human tendency to assign value to what society deems important, namely love and wealth. He suggests that while both have their stories, love's narrative remains timeless and significant, whereas the pursuit of wealth may ultimately reveal itself as an empty chase. The comparison highlights the deep and lasting impact of love compared to the transient nature of material pursuits.
In practice
During a graduation speech to highlight the importance of love over material wealth.
I always wanted to write a book about a common food that becomes a commercial commodity and therefore becomes economically important and therefore becomes politically important and culturally important. That whole process is very interesting to me. And salt seemed to me the best example of that, partly because it's universal.
Food is about agriculture, about ecology, about man's relationship with nature, about the climate, about nation-building, cultural struggles, friends and enemies, alliances, wars, religion. It is about memory and tradition and, at times, even about sex.
One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world.
It is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.
There's a lot of things blamed on me that never happened. But then, there's a lot of things that I did that I never got caught at.
Celebrity distorts democracy by giving the rich, beautiful, and famous more authority than they deserve.
One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it.
Nirvana is not the blowing out of the candle. It is the extinguishing of the flame because day is come.
The true basis of religion is not belief, but intuitive experience. Intuition is the soul’s power of knowing God. To know what religion is really all about, one must know God.
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