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.
BEN OKRIPeople are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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In 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.
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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.
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We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.
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When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity’s chief instrument.
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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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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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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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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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a dream can be the highest point of a life
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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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It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.
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Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.
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I learned that life will go through changes – up and down and up again. It’s what life does.
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The greatest religions convert the world through stories.
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We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, at the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It’s just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there.
BEN OKRI