Daily Inspiration Quote by Wole Soyinka

Soyinka is describing conviction the way a dramatist would: not as an opinion you hold, but as a role you commit to under lights. The line turns belief into a test of nerve. If you "believed absolutely", he suggests, you owe the belief an ending - action - and not the tasteful kind that stops at eloquent talk. The insistence on "confidence" and "self-certainty" isn’t motivational poster language; it’s a pressure point. Absolute belief, in this framing, is less a comfort than a demand that strips away excuses.

The subtext is wary. Soyinka knows that certainty is double-edged in societies where "cause" talk can sanctify everything from liberation to tyranny. By pairing "any cause" with the requirement to "go through with" a course of action, he exposes the dangerous purity of absolutism: it doesn’t just energize resistance, it licenses escalation. The quote quietly asks whether people truly believe what they claim to believe - and whether they’ve counted the cost of acting like it.

Context matters because Soyinka’s career sits at the intersection of art and political consequence: Nigeria’s postcolonial turbulence, military repression, imprisonment, exile. For him, commitment isn’t a social-media identity; it can mean surveillance, cells, and the moral burden of choices made under coercive power. The sentence’s long, winding structure mirrors that gravity, as if conviction itself has to be argued into existence, then carried, unbroken, to its logical end.