Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
Trading and religion have always been aligned together in the history of the world, and especially on the African continent.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the historical intertwining of trade and religious practices, particularly in Africa.
Wole Soyinka highlights the long-standing relationship between trading and religious beliefs, indicating that throughout history, these two spheres have influenced each other significantly. On the African continent, this relationship could be seen in how trade networks facilitated the spread of religious ideas, and vice versa, shaping the cultural and spiritual landscapes of societies.
In practice
In a discussion about the cultural practices of African communities, this quote illustrates the role of trade in shaping their spiritual lives.
Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
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.
I'm an Afro-realist. I take what comes, and I do my best to affect what is unacceptable in society.
The eternal difference between right and wrong does not fluctuate, it is immutable.
By medicine life may be prolonged, yet death will seize the doctor too.
I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Baseball, like Pericles' Athens (or any other good society), is simultaneously democratic and aristrocratic. Anyone can enjoy it, but the more you apply yourself, the more you enjoy it.
Within this arena, which grows more stable night after day, generations work and love and hope and vanish. New generations tread on the corpses of their fathers, continue the work above the abyss and struggle to tame the dread mystery. How? By cultivating a single field, by kissing a woman, by studying a stone, an animal, an idea.
An intellectual inferiority of the masses would manifest itself most evidently in their aiming at the abolition of the system in which they themselves are supreme and are served by the elite of the most talented men.
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