Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of accepting reality while striving for social change.
Wole Soyinka's quote reflects the philosophy of Afro-realism, which advocates for an honest recognition of the challenges faced by society while also encouraging active engagement in addressing and changing unacceptable social conditions. It speaks to the duality of acceptance and proactive action in the pursuit of justice and improvement in the community.
In practice
During a speech on social activism, one might say, 'As Wole Soyinka expressed, I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society.'
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.
When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities - locally, nationally and globally - that share the characteristics of all successful communities.
We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. Immune to othersβ pain and loss.
I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person's life. God is in everyone's life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else - God is in this person's life. You can - you must - try to seek God in every human life.
It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature-and the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning-and it is those few that I have always sought to address. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or "The Fountainhead" that they will betray: it is their own souls.
We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by which the universe understands itself.
Victory has a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan.
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