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Top Ben Okri Quotes

Browse top 46 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Ben Okri.

Favorite Ben Okri Quotes

1. "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. 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." ~ Ben Okri
2. "A tolerable hell is better than an impossible heaven." ~ Ben Okri
3. "An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness." ~ Ben Okri
4. "So long as a canvas is empty its potential is infinite… The empty canvas can become a gateway into the landscape of nightmares or a vision of sensual bliss." ~ Ben Okri
5. "Vivere è una continua metamorfosi. Ogni cosa è cambiamento; ogni cosa è relativa." ~ Ben Okri
6. "I mean we desperately wanted to be in love with something or other. We were lonely people. It seemed more sensible to fall in love with another person who also wanted to fall in love, than to love a chair or a cat or an idea." ~ Ben Okri
7. "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. 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
8. "In a fractured age, when cynicism is god, here is a possible heresy: we live by stories, we also live in them. One way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, we are also living the stories we planted - knowingly or unknowingly - in ourselves. We live the stories that either give our lives meaning, or negate it with meaninglessness. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change or lives." ~ Ben Okri
9. "Only those who truly love and who are truly strong can sustain their lives as a dream. You dwell in your own enchantment. 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. 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
10. "This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down." ~ Ben Okri
11. "Will you be at the harvest, Among the gatherers of new fruits?Then you must begin today to remakeYour mental and spiritual world,And join the warriors and celebrantsOf freedom, realizers of great dreams. You can't remake the worldWithout remaking yourself.Each new era begins within.It is an inward event,With unsuspected possibilitiesFor inner liberation.We could use it to turn onOur inward lights.We could use it to use even the darkAnd negative things positively.We could use the new eraTo clean our eyes,To see the world differently,To see ourselves more clearly.Only free people can make a free world.Infect the world with your light.Help fulfill the golden prophecies.Press forward the human genius.Our future is greater than our past." ~ Ben Okri
12. "One human life is deeper than the ocean. Strange fishes and sea-monsters and mighty plants live in the rock-bed of our spirits. 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
13. "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... A love, inspired, it seems, by the gods, which it is impossible to fight, distort, destroy, or weaken. In fact, the attempts to destroy such loves only strengthen them. And to do nothing allows them to continue to grow at their natural pace, inexoribly, till this love becomes a wide and silent adoration." ~ Ben Okri
14. "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." ~ Ben Okri
15. "Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn't care to sit next to in a train, people that don't exist, places you've never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader's creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive." ~ Ben Okri
16. "A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life." ~ Ben Okri
17. "I held you in the squareAnd felt the eveningRe-order itself aroundYour smile." ~ Ben Okri
18. "Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously." ~ Ben Okri
19. "We disliked the rigours of existence, the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the Living in the midst of the simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see." ~ Ben Okri
20. "We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination." ~ Ben Okri
21. "Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases." ~ Ben Okri
22. "It may be that what you could be haunts you. It is real. It is a weight you have to carry around. Each failure to become, to be, is a weight. Each state you could inhabit is a burden as heavy as any physical weight, but more so, because it weighs on your soul. It is the ghost of your possibilities hanging around your neck, an invisible albatros, potentials unknowingly murdered." ~ Ben Okri
23. "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
24. "A people are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves. Sick storytellers can make nations sick. Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it's moorings or orientation... Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart larger." ~ Ben Okri
25. "When you can imagine you begin to create and when you begin to create you realize that you can create a world that you prefer to live in, rather than a world that you're suffering in." ~ Ben Okri
26. "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." ~ Ben Okri
27. "I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people." ~ Ben Okri
28. "To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something." ~ Ben Okri
29. "I know that human beings are capable of anything." ~ Ben Okri
30. "I was born left-handed, but I was made to use my other hand. When I was writing 'Famished Road,' which was very long, I got repetitive stress syndrome. My right wrist collapsed, so I started using my left hand. The prose I wrote with my left hand came out denser, so later on I had to change it." ~ Ben Okri
31. "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
32. "The greatest religions convert the world through stories." ~ Ben Okri
33. "To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home." ~ Ben Okri
34. "We never think that our mothers will die. It was like suddenly an abyss opened at my feet - I was standing on nothing. It was the strangest thing. Her passing away ripped the solidity out of the world." ~ Ben Okri
35. "I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare." ~ Ben Okri
36. "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." ~ Ben Okri
37. "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
38. "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
39. "Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger." ~ Ben Okri
40. "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." ~ Ben Okri
41. "I lived rough, by my wits, was homeless, lived on the streets, lived on friends' floors, was happy, was miserable." ~ Ben Okri
42. "The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell." ~ Ben Okri
43. "The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like." ~ Ben Okri
44. "Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide." ~ Ben Okri
45. "A dream can be the highest point of a life." ~ Ben Okri
46. "The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time." ~ Ben Okri

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Everybody has problems. Everyone has issues."
Author: Ann Romney

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