Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.
Interpretation
Legends can shape our understanding of reality, sometimes even surpassing factual truths in their impact.
This quote by Salman Rushdie suggests that legends and narratives can have a significant influence on our perception of reality, possibly providing guidance or a deeper understanding that strict facts may not convey. In essence, myths and stories can resonate more powerfully with us, leading to a profound effect on our beliefs and actions, making them indispensable despite their departure from factual accuracy.
In practice
During a discussion about the importance of storytelling in culture.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
The present flowed by them like a stream. The tree rustled. It had made music before they were born, and would continue after their deaths, but its song was of the moment. The moment had passed. The tree rustled again. Their senses were sharpened, and they seemed to apprehend life. Life passed. The tree rustled again.
I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?
All of us have not been to a natural prison, but everybody in here has had a spiritual prison.
Bad times, hard times, this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
Truly man is the king of beasts, for his brutality exceeds them. We live by the death of others. We are burial places.
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