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 OKRISuccess will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight. Your life will always surprise you.
More Ben Okri Quotes
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I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.
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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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The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.
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Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.
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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.
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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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People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
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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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The worst realities of our age are manufactured realities. It is therefore our task, as creative participants in the universe, to re dream our world. The fact of possessing imagination means that everything can be re dreamed. Each reality can have it
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One of the greatest gifts my father gave me – unintentionally – was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.
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Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression.
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I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren’t allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.
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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.
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Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard.
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There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild.
BEN OKRI