Quote

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

Ben Okri

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Ben Okri
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: March 15
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Silence
Ought
Enemy
Painters
Mute
Painter
Speech
Expression

More quotes by Ben Okri

Image
To sustain your belief through situations that completely undermine it is quite something.
Ben Okri
Image
Destiny plans a different route and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.
Ben Okri
Image
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
Image
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
Image
People are as healthy and confident as the stories they tell themselves.
Ben Okri
Image
Don't neglect the gold in your own back yard.
Ben Okri
Image
This is what you must be like. Grow wherever life puts you down.
Ben Okri
Image
The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.
Ben Okri
Image
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
Image
When chaos is the god of an era, clamorous music is the deity's chief instrument.
Ben Okri
Image
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 Okri
Image
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 Okri
Image
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.
Ben Okri
Image
I am not fighting for success, just to get more beauty out of myself and share it with more people.
Ben Okri
Image
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
Ben Okri
Image
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.
Ben Okri
Image
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.
Ben Okri
Image
When you stop inventing reality then you see things as they really are.
Ben Okri
Image
One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity. We had a bit of a rollercoaster life with some really challenging financial periods. He was always unshaken, completely tranquil, the same ebullient, laughing, jovial man.
Ben Okri
Image
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