In the eyes of the villager handcuffs were the most deadly of the white man’s weapons. The sight of a fighting man reduced to impotence and helplessness with an iron lock was the final humiliation. It was a treatment given only to violent lunatics.

In all great compounds there must be people of all minds – some good, some bad, some fearless and some cowardly; those who bring in wealth and those who scatter it, those who give good advice and those who only speak the words of palm wine. That is why we say that whatever tune you play in the compound of a great man there is always someone to dance to it. The love of title is a universal human failing.

If a man sought for a companion who acted entirely like himself he would live in solitude.

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat left for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.

The world is changing. I do not like it. But I am like the bird Eneke-nti-oba. When his friends asked him why he was always on the wing he replied: ‘Men of today have learnt to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching.’ I want one of my sons to join these people and be my eye there. If there is nothing in it you will come back. But if there is something there you will bring home my share. The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not stand in one place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today will be saying had we known tomorrow.

You say you love rain, but you use an umbrella to walk under it. You say you love sun, but you seek shelter when it is shining. You say you love wind, but when it comes you close your windows. So that's why I am scared when you say you love me.

Vulnerability is the most accurate form of courage.

Everyday I am çapuling

Be the leader you wish to follow.

Drama is universal. It is a globalization of emotion.

- Always look at the full half of the glass, daughter.
- That glass is half full of shit, mom!

A tree once told another tree that he wanted to see how tall he could grow. And then its roots looked deeper in the ground for water, and its leaves changed accordingly, as did its flowers and its fruits.

Some things you take with you and some things you leave behind.

What a difficult challenge advances in communications have become in recent decades. On the one hand they are definitely bringing us closer to each other, but are they really bringing us together? Between person and person, between the Self and the Other, a technological intermediary has been introduced – an electrical spark, an electronic impulse, a network, a link, a satellite. The Hindi word upanishada means to sit near, to be near. The Self has been brought to the Other not only by words, but also by being close, by direct contact, by being together. Nothing is capable of taking the place of this experience.

Others are the mirror in which I look at myself, and which tells me who I am.

At the start of the origin of awareness of the self lies the presence of you, and perhaps even the presence of a more general we. Only in dialogue, in argument, in opposition, and also in aspiring towards a new community is awareness of my self created, as a self-contained being, separate from another. I know that I am, because I know that another is.

For me the world has always been a great Tower of Babel. However, it is a tower in which God has mixed not just the languages but also the cultures and customs, passions and interests, and whose inhabitant He has made into an ambivalent creature combining the Self and non-Self, himself and the Other, his own and the alien.

Heredotus was aware of man's sedentary nature and realized that to get to know Others you must set off on a journey, go to them, and show a desire to meet them; so he kept travelling, visiting the Egyptians and the Scythians, the Persians and the Lydians, remembering everything he heard from them, as well as what he saw for himself. In short, he wanted to know them because he understood that to know ourselves we have to know Others, who act as the mirror in which we see ourselves reflected; he knew that to understand ourselves better we have to understand Others, to compare ourselves with them, to measure ourselves against them. As a citizen of the world, he did not believe that we should isolate ourselves from Others, or slam the gates in their faces. Xenophobia, Herodotus implied, is a sickness of people who are scared, suffering an inferiority complex, terrified by the prospect of seeing themselves in the mirror of the culture of Others.

If I made it home, anyone can make it home.

Everything seems impossible until it's done.

When the world stops, I start to live.

Let Toronto become Milan. Montreal will always be Rome.

Before you fall asleep, you fall into thoughts and thoughts carry you far beyond your dreams. The reality is either at thoughts or at dreams...

Good days with a bad date

Cross that bridge when you come to it.