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 OKRIOur 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.
More Ben Okri Quotes
-
-
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
BEN OKRI -
Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.
BEN OKRI -
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 -
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
BEN OKRI -
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 -
People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
BEN OKRI -
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 -
What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.
BEN OKRI -
People like you enrich the dreams of the worlds, and it is dreams that create history. People like you are unknowing transformers of things, protected by your own fairy-tale, by love.
BEN OKRI -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
BEN OKRI -
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI -
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 -
Life throws stones at you, but your love and your dream change those stones into the flowers of discovery. Even if you lose, or are defeated by things, your triumph will always be exemplary. And if no one knows it, then there are places that do.
BEN OKRI -
A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
BEN OKRI -
There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
BEN OKRI -
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 -
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
BEN OKRI -
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 -
There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert. When a figure is loved for their deeds, their conquests, their heroism, their goodness, their love of the people, these are easy enough to destroy… But there is a kind of love which is felt for apparently no reason…
BEN OKRI -
I was going to be a scientist.
BEN OKRI -
An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
BEN OKRI -
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
BEN OKRI -
Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
BEN OKRI