In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value. The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories. But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that people often equate true value with love and wealth, but emphasizes the lasting nature of love over the fleeting pursuit of wealth.
Mark Kurlansky's quote reflects on the human tendency to assign value to what society deems important, namely love and wealth. He suggests that while both have their stories, love's narrative remains timeless and significant, whereas the pursuit of wealth may ultimately reveal itself as an empty chase. The comparison highlights the deep and lasting impact of love compared to the transient nature of material pursuits.
In practice
During a graduation speech to highlight the importance of love over material wealth.
I always wanted to write a book about a common food that becomes a commercial commodity and therefore becomes economically important and therefore becomes politically important and culturally important. That whole process is very interesting to me. And salt seemed to me the best example of that, partly because it's universal.
Food is about agriculture, about ecology, about man's relationship with nature, about the climate, about nation-building, cultural struggles, friends and enemies, alliances, wars, religion. It is about memory and tradition and, at times, even about sex.
One of the truly horrible things about the Holocaust is that it doesn't end in 1945. It keeps affecting our lives in the way we think, and it will affect the way our children see the world.
We are all mediators, translators.
We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them
Trust is a social good to be protected just as much as the air we breathe or the water we drink. When it is damaged, the community as a whole suffers; and when it is destroyed, societies falter and collapse
Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.
When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt — we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.
How sickness enlarges the dimensions of a man's self to himself! Supreme selfishness is inculcated upon him as his only duty.
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