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 OKRIIn the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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Wholeness is the enemy of the artist. We ought to be broken, ruined in some way.
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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.
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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.
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We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.
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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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Our 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.
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To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.
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Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories
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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories that either give our lives meaning or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’
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One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits.
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To see the madness and yet walk a perfect silver line. … That’s what the true story-teller should be: a great guide, a clear mind, who can walk a silver line in hell or madness.
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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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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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An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.
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I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
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Don’t try and press it down. Don’t hide from it. Don’t escape. It is life too. It is truth. But it will pass and time will put a strange honey in the bitterness. That’s the way life goes.
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To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.
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The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
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The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.
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A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
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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.
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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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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