Ben Okri Quotes

33 Sourced Quotes

The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.

Ben Okri
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.

Ben Okri
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
The world is full of riddles that only the dead can answer.

Ben Okri
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.

Ben Okri
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.

Ben Okri
If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.

Ben Okri
We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.

Ben Okri
Many people have walked out of life because they stopped seeing it. Many have fallen into the abyss because they were looking for solid ground, for certainties. Happy are those who are still, and to whom things come.

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

Ben Okri
The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.

Ben Okri
To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line.... That's what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.

Ben Okri
The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it

Ben Okri
The sun bared the reality of our lives and everything was so harsh it was a mystery that we could understand and care for one another or for anything at all.

Ben Okri
The earliest storytellers were magi, seers, bards, griots, shamans. They were, it would seem, old as time, and as terrifying to gaze upon as the mysteries with which they wrestled.. (they) helped the community live though one more darkness, with eyes wide open, and with hearts set alight.

Ben Okri
We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.

Ben Okri
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.

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

Ben Okri
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
Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.

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

Ben Okri
Don't despair too much if you see beautiful things destroyed, if you see them perish. Because the best things are always growing in secret.

Ben Okri
Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories.

Ben Okri
I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.

Ben Okri
A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.

Ben Okri
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

Ben Okri
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
I think our childhood goes back thousands of years, farther back than the memory of any race.

Ben Okri
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
One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. The whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.

Ben Okri