Chinua Achebe - Man Quotes

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Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

Chinua Achebe
The Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly, so his chi agreed. And not only his chi but his clan too, because it judged a man by the work of his hands.

Chinua Achebe
When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.

Chinua Achebe
When a man is at peace with his gods and ancestors, his harvest will be good or bad according to the strength of his arm.

Chinua Achebe
There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.

Chinua Achebe
We do not seek to hurt any man, but if any man seeks to hurt us may he break his neck.

Chinua Achebe
This is not pessimism but rather casting a cold eye on things. It is only one man's story, and I think that things will go better, but difficulties exist and nothing is served by hiding them under a poetic veil or under a lyricism of the past. I am against slogans.

Chinua Achebe
[Would] a sensible man spit out the juicy morsel that good fortune put in his mouth?

Chinua Achebe
The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a resonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.'

Chinua Achebe
The white man is very clever. He came quietly with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

Chinua Achebe
A proud heart can survive general failure because such a failure does not prick its pride. It is more difficult and more bitter when a man fails alone.

Chinua Achebe
A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness

Chinua Achebe
At the most one could say that his chi or... personal god was good. But the Ibo people have a proverb that when a man says yes his chi says yes also. Okonkwo said yes very strongly; so his chi agreed.

Chinua Achebe
No matter how prosperous a man was, if he was unable to rule his women and his children (and especially his women) he was not really a man.

Chinua Achebe
The world is large, said Okonkwo. I have even heard that in some tribes a man's children belong to his wife and her family. That cannot be, said Machi. You might as well say that the woman lies on top of the man when they are making the babies.

Chinua Achebe
I have learnt that a man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.

Chinua Achebe
A man of worth never gets up to unsay what he said yesterday.

Chinua Achebe
"Beware Okonkwo!" she warned. "Beware of exchanging words with Agbala. Does a man speak when a god speaks? Beware!"

Chinua Achebe
A man to whom you do a favor will not understand if you say nothing, make no noise, just walk away. You may cause more trouble by refusing a bribe than by accepting it.

Chinua Achebe
After such treatment it would think twice before coming again, unless it was one of the stubborn ones who returned, carrying the stamp of their mutilation—a missing finger or perhaps a dark line where the medicine man's razor had cut them.

Chinua Achebe
Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate that the fear of evil and capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and of the forces of nature, malevolent, red in tooth and claw. Okonkwo's fear was greater than these. It was not external but lay deep within himself.

Chinua Achebe
A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them?

Chinua Achebe
"When did you become a shivering old woman," Okonkwo asked himself, "you, who are known in all the nine villages for your valor in war? How can a man who has killed five men in battle fall to pieces because he has added a boy to their number? Okonkwo, you have become a woman indeed."

Chinua Achebe
But he was not the man to go about telling his neighbors that he was in error. And so people said he had no respect for the gods of the clan. His enemies said that his good fortune had gone to his head.

Chinua Achebe
In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. One of them was that a District Commissioner must never attend to such undignified details as cutting a hanged man from the tree. Such attention would give the natives a poor opinion of him. In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point. [...] One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any rate.

Chinua Achebe
The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them, especially at festivals and also when an old man died, because an old man was very close to the ancestors. A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors.

Chinua Achebe
When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.

Chinua Achebe
May good confront the man on top and the man below. But let him who is jealous of another's position choke with his envy.

Chinua Achebe
A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.

Chinua Achebe
A man who lived on the banks of the Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.

Chinua Achebe