Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
Ralph EllisonRead
The truth is the light and the light is the truth.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Truth illuminates our understanding and guides our actions.
This quote by Ralph Ellison emphasizes the idea that truth serves as a guiding light in our lives. It suggests that understanding and living in accordance with the truth helps us navigate the complexities of life, providing clarity and direction, much like light reveals the world around us.
Themes
TruthLightUnderstandingGuidanceClarity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of honesty in leadership.
More from Ralph Ellison
All quotes βI am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
Ralph EllisonRead
I denounce because though implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I defend because in spite of it all, I find that I love.
Ralph EllisonRead
The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance whether created by others or by one's own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the United States which constantly remind us of our limitations while encouraging us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon man's own limitless assertion.
Ralph EllisonRead
If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then and only then will I drop my defenses and hostility, and I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.
Ralph EllisonRead
All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these days?-is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.
Ralph EllisonRead
Similar quotes
We should be slower to think that the man at his worst is the real man, and certain that the better we are ourselves the less likely is he to be at his worst in our company. Every time he talks away his own character before us he is signifying contempt for ours.
James M. BarrieRead
Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.
H. L. MenckenRead
Anyone who can be proved to be a seditious person is an outlaw before God and the emperor; and whoever is the first to put him to death does right and well. Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel.
Martin LutherRead
These were everyday sounds magnified by darkness. And darkness was nothing - it was not a substance, it was not a presence, it was no more than an absence of light.
Ian McewanRead
Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'
Paul MccartneyRead
Now, we occupy a lowly position, both in space and rank in comparison with the heavenly sphere, and the Almighty is Most High not in space, but with respect to absolute existence, greatness and power.
MaimonidesRead