“Thus Arm in Arm with thee I dare defy my century into the lists.”

Stern is the visage of necessity.

Honor women! they entwine and weave heavenly roses in our earthly life.

Art is the daughter of freedom.

A gloomy guest fits not a wedding feast.

While the womanly god demands our veneration, the godlike woman kindles our love; but while we allow ourselves to melt in the celestial loveliness, the celestial self-sufficiency holds us back in awe.

Mankind is made great or little by its own will.

No, no! I do nature injustice. She gave us inventive faculty, and set us naked, and helpless on the shore of this great ocean,–the world; swim those who can, the heavy may go to the bottom.

No greater grief than to remember days of gladness when sorrow is at hand.

Forgiveness is the divinest of victories.

His saying was: live and let live.

Great souls suffer in silence.

Not he who scorns the Saviour’s yoke Should wear his cross upon the heart.

He that is overcautious will accomplish little.

An axe at home saves hiring a carpenter.

There is no such thing as chance; and what seem to us merest accident springs from the deepest source of destiny.

Men show no mercy and expect no mercy, when honor calls, or when they fight for their idols or their gods.

The style of Parisian architecture has been proved and refined by at least three centuries of academic dictates and highly developed taste.

Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man.

We have shown that Islam can rule the world perfectly for 14 centuries, and during this time of Muslim power we did not borrow ideas like democracy from others, so why do we need to learn democracy from them now?

Though we love to think that we are civilized & developed than that of people lived centuries ago.

Twentieth-century culture’s disease is the inability to feel their reality.

While it is unlikely that poetry or art shall eliminate the reality of war in the twenty-first century, it is thrilling to know there remain individuals, and even entire communities,

His [Ben Okri’s] work poses very serious questions for the twenty-first century. Among them:

Still willing to invest in art and poetry’s own uniquely explosive contributions to the great, and small, dramas of human history.