Top 200 Chinua Achebe Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “If you only hear one side of the story, you have no understanding at all.”

— Chinua Achebe

Featured in: Quotes About Stories, Understanding Quotes

2. “Procrastination is a lazy man’s apology.”

— Chinua Achebe

Featured in: Procrastination Quotes

3. “There is that great proverb – that until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

— Chinua Achebe

4. “Nobody can teach me who I am. You can describe parts of me, but who I am – and what I need – is something I have to find out myself.”

— Chinua Achebe

Featured in: Thought Provoking Quotes

5. “As a rule I don’t like suffering to no purpose. Suffering should be creative, should give birth to something good and lovely.”

— Chinua Achebe

6. “The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.”

— Chinua Achebe

7. “When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.”

— Chinua Achebe

8. “One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.”

— Chinua Achebe

9. “If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own.”

— Chinua Achebe

Featured in: Quotes About Stories, Thought Provoking Quotes

10. “My weapon is literature.”

— Chinua Achebe

11. “When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool.”

— Chinua Achebe

Featured in: Thought Provoking Quotes

12. “People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that’s the time to do something about it, not when it’s around your neck.”

— Chinua Achebe

13. “An angry man is always a stupid man.”

— Chinua Achebe

14. “The only thing we have learnt from experience is that we learn nothing from experience.”

— Chinua Achebe

Featured in: Thought Provoking Quotes

15. “When a mad man walks naked, it is his kinsmen who feel shame, not himself.”

— Chinua Achebe

16. “When brothers fight to death a stranger inherit their father’s estate.”

— Chinua Achebe

17. “The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.”

— Chinua Achebe

18. “It is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live.”

— Chinua Achebe

19. “If you don’t like someone’s story, write your own. If you don’t like what somebody says, say what it is you don’t like.”

— Chinua Achebe

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

20. “Let the kite perch and let the eagle perch too – If one says no to the other, let his wing break.”

— Chinua Achebe

21. “An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.”

— Chinua Achebe

22. “While we do our good works let us not forget that the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary.”

— Chinua Achebe

23. “Every lizard lies on its belly, so we cannot tell which has a belly-ache.”

— Chinua Achebe

24. “When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don’t just turn it off one day.”

— Chinua Achebe

25. “We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.”

— Chinua Achebe

26. “When a coward sees a man he can beat he becomes hungry for a fight.”

— Chinua Achebe

27. “The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them.”

— Chinua Achebe

28. “There was a saying in Umuofia that as a man danced so the drums were beaten for him.”

— Chinua Achebe

29. “There is no story that is not true.”

— Chinua Achebe

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

30. “There is a moral obligation, I think, not to ally oneself with power against the powerless.”

— Chinua Achebe

31. “A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the harmattan for drying them?”

— Chinua Achebe

32. “Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. – W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming.”

— Chinua Achebe

33. “I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.”

— Chinua Achebe

34. “Do not be in a hurry to rush into the pleasures of the world like the young antelope who danced herself lame when the main dance was yet to come.”

— Chinua Achebe

35. “There is nothing to fear from someone who shouts.”

— Chinua Achebe

36. “Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings.”

— Chinua Achebe

37. “You do not know me,’ said Tortoise. ‘I am a changed man. I have learned that a man who makes trouble for others makes trouble for himself.”

— Chinua Achebe

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

— Chinua Achebe

39. “The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.”

— Chinua Achebe

40. “Nigeria is what it is because its leaders are not what they should be.”

— Chinua Achebe

41. “Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit – in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever.”

— Chinua Achebe

42. “A man who makes trouble for others is also making trouble for himself.”

— Chinua Achebe

43. “The women are, of course, the biggest single group of oppressed people in the world and, if we are to believe the Book of Genesis, the very oldest.”

— Chinua Achebe

44. “When mother-cow is chewing grass its young ones watch its mouth.”

— Chinua Achebe

45. “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

46. “People create stories create people; or rather stories create people create stories.”

— Chinua Achebe

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

47. “If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.”

— Chinua Achebe

48. “Wisdom is like a goatskin bag; every man carries his own.”

— Chinua Achebe

49. “It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.”

— Chinua Achebe

50. “Even the village rain-maker no longer claimed to be able to intervene. He could not stop the rain now, just as he would not attempt to start it in the heart of the dry season, without serious danger to his own health.”

— Chinua Achebe