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.
Interpretation
Stories shape our beliefs and values, and changing them can transform individuals and societies.
In this quote, Ben Okri emphasizes the profound impact that stories hold in our lives and cultures. He suggests that narratives, whether personal or collective, are fundamental to shaping our values and identities. By altering the stories that people and nations tell themselves, one can initiate significant change, revealing the power of storytelling in influencing human thoughts, behaviors, and societal structures.
In practice
In a speech about social change, one could use this quote to underline the importance of narrative in shaping public perception.
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 whole of human history is an undiscovered continent deep in our souls. There are dolphins, plants that dream, magic birds inside us. The sky is inside us. The earth is in us.
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.
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.
I began my writing life as a poet, so poetry has always been fundamental. I evolved from poetry to journalism to stories to novels. But poetry was always there.
The acknowledged legislators of the world take the world as given. They dislike mysteries, for mysteries cannot be coded, or legislated, and wonder cannot be made into law. And so these legislators police the accepted frontiers of things.
We can still astonish the gods in humanity_x000D_ _x000D_ And be the stuff of future legends,_x000D_ _x000D_ If we but dare to be real,_x000D_ _x000D_ And have the courage to see_x000D_ _x000D_ That this is the time to dream_x000D_ _x000D_ The best dream of them all.
To understand the power of the priesthood, we must know its limitations.
When you're...stepping over a guy on the sidewalk...does it ever occur to you to think, 'Wow. Maybe our system doesn't work?'
As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.
Consciousness is evolving throughout the universe in billions of forms. So even if we didn't make it, this wouldn't matter on cosmic scale. No gain in consciousness is ever lost, so it would simply express itself through some other form. But the very fact that I am speaking here and you are listening or reading this is a clear sign that the new consciousness is gaining a foothold on the planet.
Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.
The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.
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