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Don't take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
Wole Soyinka
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Wole Soyinka
Age: 90
Born: 1934
Born: July 13
Author
Essayist
Novelist
Philosopher
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Translator
Writer
Akinwande Oluwole Soyinka
Akinwande Oluwole Wole Soyinka
Safety
Illusion
Shadow
Continue
Reality
Reject
Take
Shadows
Rejects
Seriously
More quotes by Wole Soyinka
There's something about the theater which makes my fingertips tingle.
Wole Soyinka
What I teach is literary criticism and comparative literature and so on and that's my function, but from time to time it's possible for me actually to help a writer. I read something and something strikes me then, I feel I can talk to that writer about it.
Wole Soyinka
You go to conferences, and your fellow African intellectuals - and even heads of state - they all say: 'Nigeria is a big disappointment. It is the shame of the African continent.'
Wole Soyinka
No man beholds his mother's womb Yet who denies it's there? Coiled To the navel of the world is that Endless cord that links us all To the great Origin. If I lose my way. The trailing cord will bring me to the roots.
Wole Soyinka
I rarely use mythology for its own sake because, as a theatre person, the mythological figures are in fact humanity to the ninth degree and Yoruba mythology in particular has fascination of being one of the most humanised mythologies in the world.
Wole Soyinka
When you fight corruption, corruption strikes back and that is the truth because when you fight corruption, you get confidence and when it gets to impunity, then it gets aggressive and says, 'oh, so you think you are different? You think you are tough and different?' This is why some of us are almost permanently in the libel court.
Wole Soyinka
A human feast is an indifferent morsel to a god.
Wole Soyinka
And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
Wole Soyinka
Writers - human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.
Wole Soyinka
I never hesitated, as a student, in embracing the necessity of violence. In South Africa, I didn't just accept it I looked forward to it as a mission.
Wole Soyinka
Society itself is responsible for the degradation.
Wole Soyinka
The media must be used effectively to reach the masses. You have to find a new language in which to address the people and demonstrate what is possible.
Wole Soyinka
Given the scale of trauma caused by the genocide, Rwanda has indicated that however thin the hope of a community can be, a hero always emerges. Although no one can dare claim that it is now a perfect state, and that no more work is needed, Rwanda has risen from the ashes as a model or truth and reconciliation.
Wole Soyinka
Power is domination, control, and therefore a very selective form of truth which is a lie.
Wole Soyinka
Arts and the Sciences are a natural symbiosis. They stem from the same human existential impulse - exploration. Exploration of what lies beneath the surface, and re-confuguration of elements of what we call reality.
Wole Soyinka
Alfred Nobel regretted that his invention, dynamite, was converted to degrading use, hence his creation of the Nobel Prize, as the humanist counter to the destructive power of his genius.
Wole Soyinka
I think I'm a very lazy writer and by that I mean that I do not battle, I don't struggle too hard against it. If I have difficulties in the writing, I just go and do other things. I don't feel a compulsion to write.
Wole Soyinka
Governance can dig itself into a huge hole and not even know it's in there.
Wole Soyinka
Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
Wole Soyinka
My father used to tell me stories before I fell asleep. When the children would gather, at a certain point, I had a tendency to make up my own elementary variations on stories I had heard, or to invent totally new ones.
Wole Soyinka