“Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few—and to struggle with it until it reveals its mad, vari-implicated chaos, its false faces, and on until it surrenders its insight, its truth.”

—  Ralph Ellison

"Brave Words for a Startling Occasion" (1953), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 154.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Our task then is always to challenge the apparent forms of reality—that is, the fixed meaning and values of the few—and…" by Ralph Ellison?
Ralph Ellison photo
Ralph Ellison 82
American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer 1914–1994

Related quotes

“Every speech, for Olivier, is like a mass of marble at which the sculptor chips away until its essential form and meaning are revealed. No matter how ignoble the character he plays, the result is always noble as a work of art.”

Kenneth Tynan (1927–1980) English theatre critic and writer

"Laurence Olivier" (1966), p. 208
Profiles (1990)

“The inner connection between a positivism of numbers and quantities and one of human values and qualities is the excision of a critical distance and theory. Both surrender to different faces of reality—its facts or its ideology—and both stay clear and clean of antagonisms and contradictions.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 61

Alan Keyes photo

“When we surrender moral government to the courts, we have surrendered the very essence of freedom, we have surrendered its only real meaning--and we will not be free again until we get it back.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Speech in Hillsdale, Michigan, February 7, 2004. http://renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/04_02_07hillsdale.htm.
2009

Michel Foucault photo

“If our intention now is to reveal classical unreason on its own terms, outside of its ties with dreams and error, it must be understood not as a form of reason that is somehow diseased, lost or mad, but quite simply as reason dazzled.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
History of Madness (1961)

Alan Charles Kors photo

“Until socialism is confronted with its lived, communist reality, the gravest atrocities of all recorded human life, we live in its age.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Michael Crichton photo

“Increasingly, the mathematics will demand the courage to face its implications.”

Michael Crichton book Jurassic Park

Source: Jurassic Park

“When I really believe a thing, I mean that its truth possesses me... Truth is self-authenticating, and when it possesses me, nothing can shake it from its enthronement until some greater truth displaces it or gives it less prominence.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.31 ,[ellipsis added]

Elizabeth Prentiss photo

“No truth can be said to be seen as it is until it is seen in its relation to all other truths. In this relation only is it true.”

Elizabeth Prentiss (1818–1878) American musician, hymnwriter

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 603.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan photo

“Poetic truth is different from scientific truth since it reveals the real in its qualitative uniqueness and not in its quantitative universality.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Context: Poetic truth is different from scientific truth since it reveals the real in its qualitative uniqueness and not in its quantitative universality. Poetry is the language of the soul, while prose is the language of science. The former is the language of mystery, of devotion, of religion. Prose lays bare its whole meaning to the intelligence, while poetry plunges us in the mysterium tremendum of life and suggests the truths that cannot be stated.

Vladimir Lenin photo

“Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence… The class struggle did not accidentally assume its latest form, the form in which the exploited class takes all the means of power in its own hands in order to completely destroy its class enemy, the bourgeoisie…”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

As quoted in Report on the Activities of the Council of People’s Commissars, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pages 459-61.
Attributions

Related topics