But that is the thing about miracles: it is perception that determines them as such, not facts.
Interpretation
Miracles are defined by how we perceive them rather than by the objective facts surrounding them.
This quote emphasizes the subjective nature of miracles, suggesting that what we consider miraculous is heavily influenced by our personal perception and interpretation. While objective facts may not support the occurrence of a miraculous event, it is our emotional response and belief that often define it as a miracle in our lives.
In practice
During a speech about resilience, one might quote this when discussing how positive thinking can shape our experiences.
That idea is strange to me. People keep on loving? People keep on loving even if you are not there in their face everyday to remind them? People keep on loving even if they no longer see you at all? People keep on loving even if they are loving someone else? Impossible: to believe you can be loved in absence when you don't even know how it feels to be loved when you are there.
Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made.
We no longer see the world as a single entity. We've moved to cities and we think the economy is what gives us our life, that if the economy is strong we can afford garbage collection and sewage disposal and fresh food and water and electricity. We go through life thinking that money is the key to having whatever we want, without regard to what it does to the rest of the world.
Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.
Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.
Philosophy as practice does not mean its restriction to utility or applicability, that is, to what serves morality or produces serenity of soul.
It is insane that two men, sitting on opposite sides of the world, should be able to decide to bring an end to civilization.
The private control of credit is the modern form of slavery.
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