Ben Okri Quotes

There is inspiration all around us.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

The only limits are, as always, those of vision.

All great and beautiful work has come of first gazing without shrinking into the darkness.

Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative place where no one else has ever been.

Once, the world was full of mysteries, some of them frightening, some of them wonderful, some of them merely fascinating. Now, it can be a banal and predictable place, the tracks of daily life so well-beaten and defined, our culture awash with the imbecile obvious, our existence suffocating in safety. But mysteries remain.

Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere of activity in which we are permitted to remain children all our lives.

'Be passionate about your work and your life' was instilled in me by my mother Dada, who was a potter. She also introduced me to the arts and encouraged me to embrace the new.

Play is the exultation of the possible.

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.

Victorville gave me opportunity to go inside and explore my imagination a bit.

I dwell in possibility.

I sometimes worry that all the beautiful things have been made.

The last thing I want is for people to go through the motions in life. We're all meant to do different things, but there's a lot of opportunity for us to do some great things.

Some people say there's nothing new under the sun. I still think that there's room to create, you know. And intuition doesn't necessarily come from under this sun. It comes from within.

There are so many amazing parts to life, so many amazing things to write about.

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.

As long as a thing is unknown, it belongs to us in a way that well-known things do not. For we have the opportunity to fill the empty, unknown spaces for ourselves, and in them there is room for imagination and for hope.

Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.

Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.

Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It's definitely one of my greatest joys, and I'm a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.