Ben Okri Short Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ben Okri
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
Each moment offered us clarity and liberation but we settled for the comforting shapes of legends, no matter how monstrous or useless.

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
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
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 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
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