Top 100 Ben Okri Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.”

— Ben Okri

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

— Ben Okri

53. “When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.”

— Ben Okri

54. “The greatest religions convert the world through stories.”

— Ben Okri

55. “There are many reasons why babies cry when they are born, and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering.”

— Ben Okri

56. “What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self? Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?”

— Ben Okri

57. “To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.”

— Ben Okri

58. “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

59. “That’s good. Life is full of riddles that only the dead can answer,” was Dad’s reply.”

— Ben Okri

60. “I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.”

— Ben Okri

61. “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

62. “There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.”

— Ben Okri

63. “We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.”

— Ben Okri

64. “They made me think. Everything has to fight to live. Rats work very hard. If we are not careful they will inherit the earth.”

— Ben Okri

65. “The higher the artist, the fewer the gestures. The fewer the tools, the greater the imagination. The greater the will, the greater the secret failure.”

— Ben Okri

66. “TWars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle.”

— Ben Okri

67. “It is not death that human beings are most afraid of, it is love.”

— Ben Okri

68. “Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.”

— Ben Okri

69. “He saw the world in which black people always suffered and he didn’t like it. He saw a world in which human beings suffered so needlessly from Antipodes to Equator, and he didn’t like it either. He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and the blood of war. He saw our people always preyed upon by other powers, manipulated by the Western world, our history and achievements rigged out of existence.”

— Ben Okri

70. “I’m conscious of a series of circles working its way through my life. And at this particular moment I have come round to the beginning of my writing cycle. It begins with poetry. There’s hardly a day that goes past on which I don’t write poetry.”

— Ben Okri

71. “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

72. “A dream can be the highest point of a life.”

— Ben Okri

73. “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

74. “The antimony on their features was set on silvery fire by the intensity of the moon. And their bodies, solid and quivering and half-naked, were like ancient memories of a mystical time without boundaries when it was possible to enter the consciousness of a cornseed and foretell the harvest to come.”

— Ben Okri

75. “I noticed that in a corner, across from where they ate with such innocent relish, sitting forlorn and abandoned, was the ghost of their son. He had lost both of his arms, one side of his face was squashed, and both his eyes had burst. He had bluish wings. He was the saddest ghost in the house.”

— Ben Okri

76. “After a while, when nothing happened, when no reprisals fell on us, it seemed that nothing significant had happened. Some of us began to distrust our memories. We began to think that we had collectively dreamt up the fevers of that night. It wouldn’t be the first or the last time. Meanwhile, the river of wild jaguars flowed below the surface of our hungry roads.”

— Ben Okri

77. “Understanding is a pure glass of water. All great truths have no taste. Hints of sweetness are coloured by the need for amazement.”

— Ben Okri

78. “Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think.”

— Ben Okri

79. “If I don’t say the thought right I might destroy it.”

— Ben Okri

80. “Her legend, which would sprout a thousand hallucinations, had been born in our midst – born of stories and rumours which, in time, would become some of the most extravagant realities of our lives.”

— Ben Okri

81. “We must take an interest in politics. We must become spies on behalf of justice.”

— Ben Okri

82. “The school-children were in their uniforms. A cock crowed repeatedly. Mum got her tray together. I was ready for school. Mum went down the street, swaying, moving a little sleepily, with one more burden added to her life. She was merely a detail in the poverty of our area.”

— Ben Okri

83. “I was going to be a scientist.”

— Ben Okri

84. “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

85. “But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble.”

— Ben Okri

86. “Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.”

— Ben Okri

87. “Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.”

— Ben Okri

88. “He danced there like an overturned centipede.”

— Ben Okri

89. “Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.”

— Ben Okri

90. “I know that human beings are capable of anything.”

— Ben Okri

91. “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

92. “He thought about how the camera makes one fall in love with an image of oneself, and perpetuates a false reality.”

— Ben Okri

93. “When we’ve been travelling around I’ve often thought: Oh, this would be a good place to be, and that would be an excellent place to live. And yet, after I’ve seen everything I’ve decided that home, wherever that may be, is the place for feelings of peace. And if I can be at peace with myself then that is the most important thing. I think travelling teaches one that.”

— Ben Okri

94. “That you see a star in the night sky does not mean that the star sees you. The universe does not mirror consciousness. Consciousness mirrors the universe.”

— Ben Okri

95. “When you make sense of something, it tends to disappear. It is only mystery which keeps things alive.”

— Ben Okri

96. “Because you rejected my love, this is my curse on you. Refusing to love an illusion, you will have to love without illusion.”

— Ben Okri

97. “And he remembered only because he didn’t want to have to go through it all over again, making all the mistakes of his confusion.”

— Ben Okri

98. “Is there anything more real than what we have created in our minds?”

— Ben Okri

99. “As he walked though, listening to his happy footfalls, he felt the world telling him to stop looking, for then he would see beyond; to stop thinking, for then he would comprehend; to stop trying to make sense of things, for then he would find the truest grace.”

— Ben Okri

100. “When we yearn, our yearning comes through from deep below. It comes from a deep remembering, from the forgotten dreams of our mingled ancestry. You are my yearning. And this is the night, long ago, when our stars first met. They are together now, in the heavens, shedding a beautiful radiance on this night. They are weaving enchantments for us so that we may step through the invisible mirror in the air and enter the fairy-tale we are meant to live, but which we forgot.”

— Ben Okri