61+ Ben Okri Quotes On Education, Friendship And Us

Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet, novelist, and essayist. He is best known for his 1991 novel The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize. His writing often focuses on the social and political issues of post-colonial Nigeria and his works often explore the beauty and chaos of modern life. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ben Okri on love, life, education.

Top 10 Ben Okri Quotes

1. We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
2. Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
3. There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
4. The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
5. We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.
6. An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
7. Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
8. Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
9. One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
10. I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable.

Ben Okri Short Quotes

• Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
• When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
• Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.
• I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
• People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
• I was going to be a scientist.
• Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
• Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
• I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.
• What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.

Ben Okri Quotes About Life

Literature doesn't have a country. Shakespeare is an African writer. His Falstaff, for example, is very African in his appetite for life, his largeness of spirit. The characters of Turgenev are ghetto dwellers. Dickens characters are Nigerians. — Ben Okri

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

You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone. — Ben Okri

Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you've got left is your belief in the imagination. — Ben Okri

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

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

I'm fascinated by the mysterious element that runs through our lives. Everyone is looking out of the world through their emotion and history. Nobody has an absolute reality. — Ben Okri

a dream can be the highest point of a life — Ben Okri

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

Ben Okri Quotes About Living

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

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

We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right. — Ben Okri

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

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

Ben Okri Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare. — Ben Okri

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

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

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

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

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

It is easy to forget how mysterious and mighty stories are. They do their work in silence, invisibly. They work with all the internal materials of your mind and self. They become part of you while changing you. Beware the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world. — Ben Okri

If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft — Ben Okri

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it. — Ben Okri

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

It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that. — Ben Okri

You see, I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones. — Ben Okri

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

Creativity is the art of the impossible — Ben Okri

I know that human beings are capable of anything. — 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

It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around. Each failure to become, to be, is a weight. Each state you could inhabit is a burden as heavy as any physical weight, but more so, because it weighs on your soul. It is the ghost of your possibilities hanging around your neck, an invisible albatros, potentials unknowingly murdered. — Ben Okri

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

We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see. — Ben Okri

In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry. — Ben Okri

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

Life Lessons by Ben Okri

1. Ben Okri's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the interconnectedness of all things, from the natural world to our shared humanity.
2. His poetry encourages us to look beyond our own experiences and to recognize the beauty and complexity of the world around us.
3. He emphasizes the power of storytelling to bridge divides and to create a more just and equitable society.