Ben Okri Quotes

I am fascinated with religion or things that people believe in and question that. I think it's interesting.

Religion is the search for ultimate meaning.

There's something called religion, and it was invented a long time ago by people who felt very out of control with their lives, who didn't know... why the sun always rose over the mountains.

For a while, I became an atheist; now that I'm grown up, though, I'm not hard-edged enough to be an atheist. Even though I live with a flaming atheist, I love going to temple. I love all the rituals.

One of the things that doesn't come up as much as it should, especially in literary fiction, is this idea of faith and God... I feel like those are things that should be wrestled with... because they are such an integral part of our community on every level.

I hold that religion and faith are two different things.

Religion is man's attempt to bind himself back to a relationship with God.

I think the world would be much poorer without religion, speaking generally.

Religion has a good place and it has its good people.

I'm actually an evangelical atheist, but there is something I recognise about religion: that it gives people a chance to surrender.

You can have religion with spirituality. You can also have religion without spirituality.

From a young kid, I was quite interested in religion.

Organized belief in spirituality - that's what a religion is.

I spent, as you know, a year and a half in a clergyman's family and heard almost every Tuesday the very best, most earnest and most impressive preacher it has ever been my fortune to meet with, but it produced no effect whatever on my mind.

It is inadmissible that systems of ideas like religions, which have held so considerable a place in history, and to which, in all times, men have come to receive the energy which they must have to live, should be made up of a tissue of illusions.

Religion is a reassurance - in fact, that's its only purpose.

I don't practise any religion but I am deeply interested in the answers that mankind has come up with to explain the human situation.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

Religion has nothing to do with spirituality.

Religion is one dimension of culture, a transcendent element of it.

I do not value religion chiefly for its morality.

Religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts, and ought most peculiarly to elevate us, as rational creatures, above brutes, is that wherein men often appear most irrational, and more senseless than beasts themselves.

What does that mean - you're religious? Everybody is religious.

There's nothing funnier than religion. Try explaining it to a kid. I had it all wrong when I was a kid.

I have never been religious, but I've seen the strength of it.