Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole SoyinkaRead
I ceased using words like optimism and pessimism a long time ago.
Interpretation
The speaker has moved beyond simplistic labels that define attitudes towards life.
In this quote, Wole Soyinka expresses a rejection of binary thinking, specifically the labels of optimism and pessimism, suggesting that such terms are inadequate to capture the complexity of human experience. By ceasing to use these words, he implies a more nuanced approach to life, one that recognizes a spectrum of emotions and responses rather than confining oneself to extreme viewpoints.
In practice
During a discussion on mental health, this quote can highlight the complexity of human emotions.
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.
Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.
The world is well supplied with spiders whose male ancestors died after mating. The world is bereft of spiders whose would-be ancestors never mated in the first place.
We need to confront honestly the issue of scale... You may need a large corporation to run an airline or to manufacture cars, but you don't need a large corporation to raise a chicken or a hog. You don't need a large corporation to process local food or local timber and market it locally.
What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the World.
Clay is moulded to make a vessel, but the utility of the vessel lies in the space where there is nothing. . . . Thus, taking advantage of what is, we recognize the utility of what is not.
Place is security, space is freedom.
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