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 OKRIPeople are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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Creativity is the art of the impossible
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
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I know that human beings are capable of anything.
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Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment.
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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.
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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
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The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.
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The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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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