Life & Wisdom Quote by Ben Okri

Okri turns grief into a dare: look straight at ruin, but refuse to let it be the final narrator. The opening command, "Don't despair too much", is carefully calibrated. He doesn't ban despair; he trims it. That restraint matters because it acknowledges the legitimacy of heartbreak - the real, witnessed destruction of "beautiful things" - while warning against surrendering your inner life to the spectacle of loss.

The line works by shifting the reader's attention from the public theater of collapse to the private economy of renewal. "Destroyed" and "perish" are blunt, almost biblical verbs: irreversible, total. Then comes the counterspell: "always growing in secret". The certainty of "always" is audacious, especially after conceding that beauty can be annihilated. Okri doesn't offer evidence; he offers a posture, a spiritual discipline. The subtext is political as much as personal: oppressive systems thrive on making decay feel comprehensive, like nothing else is happening. "Secret" names the hidden zones where art, love, memory, and collective resistance incubate beyond the reach of headlines, regimes, or even our own panic.

As a poet shaped by postcolonial Nigeria and by mythic, dream-inflected storytelling, Okri is fluent in the idea that reality has an unseen underlayer. This isn't optimism as denial. It's faith as strategy: if you can believe growth is underway offstage, you can keep making, organizing, caring - even when the visible world is busy proving how fragile beauty is.