Top 100 Ben Okri Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

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

— Ben Okri

3. “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

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4. “Creativity is the art of the impossible.”

— Ben Okri

5. “A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.”

— Ben Okri

6. “Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.”

— Ben Okri

7. “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

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8. “One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.”

— Ben Okri

9. “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

10. “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

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11. “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

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12. “Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.”

— Ben Okri

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

— Ben Okri

14. “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

15. “Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.”

— Ben Okri

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16. “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

17. “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

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18. “Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.”

— Ben Okri

19. “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

20. “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

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21. “People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.”

— Ben Okri

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22. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

23. “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

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

— Ben Okri

25. “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

26. “I held you in the square And felt the evening Re-order itself around Your smile.”

— Ben Okri

27. “We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.”

— Ben Okri

28. “What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.”

— Ben Okri

29. “An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.”

— Ben Okri

30. “When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.”

— Ben Okri

31. “I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you.”

— Ben Okri

32. “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

33. “The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.”

— Ben Okri

34. “Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.”

— Ben Okri

35. “This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.”

— Ben Okri

36. “The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.”

— Ben Okri

37. “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

38. “If You Look Too Deeply Everything Breaks Your Heart.”

— Ben Okri

39. “A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick.”

— Ben Okri

40. “A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.”

— Ben Okri

41. “Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.”

— Ben Okri

42. “We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think. We haven’t begun to live yet. The man whose light has come on in his head, in his dormant sun, can never be kept down or defeated. We can redream this world and make the dream real. Human beings are gods hidden from ourselves.”

— Ben Okri

43. “I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.”

— Ben Okri

44. “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

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45. “The only power poor people have is their hunger.”

— Ben Okri

46. “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

47. “To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.”

— Ben Okri

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

— Ben Okri

49. “When we have made an experience or a chaos into a story we have transformed it, made sense of it, transmuted experience, domesticated the chaos.”

— Ben Okri

50. “Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.”

— Ben Okri

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