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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.

Ben Okri

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.
BEN OKRI

Beautiful Despair Secret
I was going to be a scientist.
BEN OKRI

Dream Going Job Scientist
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
BEN OKRI

Inventing Reality Stop Thing
Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
BEN OKRI

Gold Neglect Yards
Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected.
BEN OKRI

Around Destiny Expected Riddle Way
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
BEN OKRI

Fighting People Share
What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings?
BEN OKRI

Beautiful Gun Reality
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
BEN OKRI

Chaos Deities Eras
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

Create History People Protected Transformer
Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
BEN OKRI

Art Magic Nothing
I know that human beings are capable of anything.
BEN OKRI

Capable Humans Knows
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.
BEN OKRI

Birds Fish Inside Magic Strange
The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing.
BEN OKRI

Attention Common Magic
Bad things will happen and good things too. Your life will be full of surprises. Miracles happen only where there has been suffering. So taste your grief to the fullest.
BEN OKRI

Grief Miracle Suffering
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
BEN OKRI

Jazz Past Together
I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
BEN OKRI

Again Down Up Change

Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.

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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.

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