Ben Okri Quotes

Quotes about:

• The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.

  Ben Okri

  Love, Inspirational, Sympathy

  "Ben Okri salutes Jeremy Corbyn in poetry with A New Dream of Politics" by Maev Kennedy, www.theguardian.com. October 12, 2015.

  96 Copy quote

• Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest. Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.

  Ben Okri

  Grief, Miracle, Suffering

  61 Copy quote

• The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.

  Ben Okri

  Magic, Attention, Common

  55 Copy quote

• When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in.

  Ben Okri

  Suffering, World, Realizing

  "Magical Ben Okri casts a spell on his readers". Interview with Nima Elbagir, edition.cnn.com. June 28, 2011.

  52 Copy quote

• Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do. People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.

  Ben Okri

  Dream, Strong, Flower

  66 Copy quote

• Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.

  Ben Okri

  Inspiring, Night, Water

  48 Copy quote

• To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they

  Ben Okri

  Art, Poison, Stories

  54 Copy quote

• We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.

  Ben Okri

  Definitions, Destination

  52 Copy quote

• Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

  Ben Okri

  Secret, Stories, Individual

  Eric C. Heins's CTA State Council Speech, www.cta.org. October 24, 2015.

  29 Copy quote

• A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger.

  Ben Okri

  Heart, People, Mad

  53 Copy quote

• Maybe there are only three kinds of stories: those we live, those we tell, and those that help our souls fly upwards to a greater life.

  Ben Okri

  Soul, Three, Stories

  10 Copy quote

• Creativity is the art of the impossible

  Ben Okri

  Art, Creativity, Impossible

  Ben Okri (2014). “A Way of Being Free”, p.71, Head of Zeus

  11 Copy quote

• This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.

  Ben Okri

  Grows

  13 Copy quote

• The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate. Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger. Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.

  Ben Okri

  Fate, Destiny, Rivers

  49 Copy quote

• I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.

  Ben Okri

  Fighting, People, Share

  8 Copy quote

• A man's greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.

  Ben Okri

  Fighting, Men, Battle

  Ben Okri (1980). “Flowers and shadows”

  19 Copy quote

• If we are true, if we can love, if we have vision, if we can have courage, we can, we should, we ought to, we will.

  Ben Okri

  Power, Vision, Should

  4 Copy quote

• This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we're born into stories. I say we're also born from stories.

  Ben Okri

  Ocean, People, Stories

  8 Copy quote

• Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.

  Ben Okri

  Gold, Yards, Neglect

  4 Copy quote

• Our time here is magic! It's the only space you have to realize whatever it is that is beautiful, whatever is true, whatever is great, whatever is potential, whatever is rare, whatever is unique, in. It's the only space.

  Ben Okri

  Beautiful, Unique, Space

  40 Copy quote

• We can still astonish the gods in humanity
  And be the stuff of future legends,
  If we but dare to be real,
  And have the courage to see
  That this is the time to dream
  The best dream of them all.

  Ben Okri

  Inspirational, Dream, Real

  Ben Okri (2012). “Mental Fight”, p.39, Random House

  8 Copy quote

• The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that ‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted — knowingly or unknowingly — in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’

  Ben Okri

  Giving, Age, Stories

  43 Copy quote

• There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy... But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason... A love, inspired, it seems, by the gods, which it is impossible to fight, distort, destroy, or weaken. In fact, the attempts to destroy such loves only strengthen them. And to do nothing allows them to continue to grow at their natural pace, inexoribly, till this love becomes a wide and silent adoration.

  Ben Okri

  Fighting, People, Heroism

  9 Copy quote

• Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.

  Ben Okri

  Dream, Spiritual, Art

  31 Copy quote

• There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.

  Ben Okri

  Art, Humanity, Three

  30 Copy quote

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