Ben Okri quotes are famous lines by Ben Okri in the postmodern and postcolonial eras.Known for his contribution to literature, Ben Okri is a poet, essayist, anthologist, and aphorist. This article shows how his creative selection of words describing postmodern society has left the world in awe.Having gathered life lessons from witnessing the Nigerian Civil War, these Ben Okri quotes are derived from his books, including ‘Flowers And Shadows’, ‘Songs Of Enchantment’, ‘Tales Of Freedom’, ‘The Infinite Riches’, ‘The Famished Road’, ‘The Age Of Magic’, and ‘Dangerous Love’.Ben Okri Quotes On PerceptionHere are some Ben Okri quotes that will help you gain some diverged perspectives in life.“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.““Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger."“We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“Don’t neglect the gold in your own back yard."“If you look too deeply everything breaks your heart.” -‘Songs Of Enchantment’.“Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.““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."“People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.” - ‘A Way Of Being Free’.“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.” - ‘A Way Of Being Free’.“Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.““Painters ought to be mute. Speech is the enemy of expression."“An inner darkness is darker than an outer darkness.” - ‘Dangerous Love’.“But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble.” - ‘Tales Of Freedom’.“Understanding is a pure glass of water. All great truths have no taste. Hints of sweetness are colored by the need for amazement.““We ought to step out of our old, hard casing. We think that we are one kind of people, when in fact we are always creating ourselves. We are not fixed. We are constantly becoming, constantly coming into being.““I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people."“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.” - ‘Mental Fight’.“Home can be the friend you have been searching for all your life or the person you met once very briefly.““To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralized nation tells demoralized stories to itself.““Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide."“Wars are not fought on battlegrounds but in a space smaller than the head of a needle.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“Literature doesn’t have a country.“Ben Okri Quotes On Illusion (These Ben Okri quotes are sure to put a smile on your face.)We are surrounded by illusions. Some of these Ben Okri quotes point to the illusions of life.“What you see is what you make. What you see in a people is what you eventually create in them.” - ‘A Time For New Dreams’.“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.““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."“We have not yet arrived, but every point at which we stop requires a re-definition of our destination.” - ‘Tales Of Freedom’.“The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one’s place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming.““Ghetto-dwellers are the great fantasists. There was an extraordinary vibrancy there, an imaginative life. When you are that poor, all you’ve got left is your belief in the imagination.““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.““Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose it’s moorings or orientation…““There are many reasons why babies cry when they are born, and one of them is the sudden separation from the world of pure dreams, where all things are made of enchantment, and where there is no suffering."“After a while, when nothing happened, when no reprisals fell on us, it seemed that nothing significant had happened. Some of us began to distrust our memories. We began to think that we had collectively dreamt up the fevers of that night.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“Nothing is more difficult than knowing what you really think.” - ‘A Way Of Being Free’.“You are a mischievous one. You will cause no end of trouble. You have to travel many roads before you find the river of your destiny. This life of yours will be full of riddles. You will be protected and you will never be alone.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“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."“The road will never swallow you. The river of destiny will always overcome evil. May you understand your fate.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“Suffering will never destroy you, but will make you stronger.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“Success will never confuse you of scatter your spirit, but will make you fly higher into the good sunlight.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“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."“Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world.” - ‘Birds Of Heaven’.“Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher."“What if by sheer repetition we become the person we most often pretend to be? Does that mean there is no authentic self?” - ‘A Way Of Being Free’.“Are we made of habits, compressed by time, like layered rocks?” - ‘The Age Of Magic’.“The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.“Ben Okri Quotes On LeadershipBelow are a few Ben Okri quotes about perception, illusion, leadership, and life that have inspired the better of us into believing, living, creating, and motivating.“The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.” - ‘Astonishing The Gods’.“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."“A man’s greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.” - ‘Flowers And Shadows’.“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."“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.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“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.” - ‘Dangerous Love’.“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.““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.““There ought to be three traditions in the art of humanity: the realistic, the visionary and the wild."“If I don’t say the thought right I might destroy it.” - ‘Tales Of Freedom’.“He had to learn how not to let his eyes be bewildered by manifestations, and thereby learn to treat appearances as signs and codes of the interior.““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.““Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness.““When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments.““To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.““I know that human beings are capable of anything.““Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.““I don’t think I can make people understand what my writing is about. That really belongs to time and the individual.““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.““The magician and the politician have much in common: they both have to draw our attention away from what they are really doing."“Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.” - ‘The Age Of Magic’.“We must look at ourselves differently. We are freer than we think."“The man whose light has come on in his head, in his dormant sun, can never be kept down or defeated.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“We are living in enchanted time. With our spirits right.“Ben Okri Quotes On LifeIf you want a sneak peek into the mind of this creative genius, these inspirational Ben Okri quotes about life are for you.“If we could be pure dancers in spirit we would never be afraid to love, and we would love with strength and wisdom.” - ‘Birds Of Heaven’.“Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations. even in silence we are living our stories.““I held you in the squareAnd felt the eveningRe-order itself aroundYour smile”- ‘An African Elegy’.“Creativity is the art of the impossible.““Without stories we would go mad. Life would lose its moorings or lose its orientations."“Even in silence we are living our stories.” - ‘Birds Of Heaven’.“Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn’t have expected."“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 Famished Road’.“I love your loneliness. It is brave. It makes the universe want to protect you.” - ‘Astonishing The Gods’.“A dream can be the highest point of a life.““I went to London because, for me, it was the home of literature. I went there because of Dickens and Shakespeare.““Storytellers ought not be too tame. They ought to be wild creatures who function adequately in society. They are best in disguise. If they lose all their wildness, they cannot give us the truest joys.““If you are working in an office, where do you find the time to write a novel? But you can finish a short story in five pages. Furthermore, a short story is a perfect place to learn the craft."“We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“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."“We disliked the rigors 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.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“There is a kind of expressed love which is easy to subvert."“A tolerable hell is better than an impossible heaven.” - ‘Tales Of Freedom’.“So long as a canvas is empty its potential is infinite…"“A man must be able to hold his drink because drunkenness is sometimes necessary in this difficult life.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.” - ‘The Famished Road’.“Who knows, maybe this whole planet is an asylum, a penal realm. A place for hard cases.” - ‘Tales Of Freedom’.“To anyone who is homeless, I say, find a home.”
Ben Okri quotes are famous lines by Ben Okri in the postmodern and postcolonial eras.
