20 Powerful Quotes From Prof. Wole Soyinka

Prof. Soyinka turns 88 today.

Prof. Wole Soyinka, Africa’s first Nobel Laureate turns 88 today.

Here are 20 powerful quotes from the wonderful author.

📌 One has to confront history honestly.

Wole Soyinka

📌 I grew up in an atmosphere where words were an integral part of culture.

Wole Soyinka

📌 The writer is the visionary of his people… He anticipates, he warns

Wole Soyinka

📌 Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

Wole Soyinka

📌 No one is rich enough to buy yesterday but if you hustle hard tomorrow could be yours

Wole Soyinka

📌 But the ultimate lesson is just to sit down and write. That's all

Wole Soyinka

📌 I don't know any other way to live but to wake up every day armed with my convictions, not yielding them to the threat of danger and to the power and force of people who might despise me. Wole Soyinka

📌 And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.

Wole Soyinka

📌 Art is solace; art is vision and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake. Wole Soyinka

📌 The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

Wole Soyinka

📌 My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

Wole Soyinka

📌 Being the first black Nobel laureate, and the first African, the African world considered me personal property. I lost the remaining shreds of my anonymity, even to walk a few yards in London, Paris or Frankfurt without being stopped.

Wole Soyinka

📌 Writers are human. I shudder to think how I must sometimes appear to others.

Wole Soyinka

📌I know there are writers who get up every morning and sit by their typewriter or word processor or pad of paper and wait to write. I don’t function that way. I go through a long period of gestation before I’m even ready to write.

Wole Soyinka

📌 You cannot live a normal existence if you haven’t taken care of a problem that affects your life and affects the lives of others, values that you hold which in fact define your very existence.

Wole Soyinka

📌 The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.

Wole Soyinka

📌 Don’t take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion

📌 History teaches us to beware of the excitation of the liberated and the injustices that often accompany their righteous thirst for justice

Wole Soyinka

📌 I have one abiding religion-human liberty..

Wole Soyinka

📌 I am a very curious person; I’ll always ask: is this thing true, is it not true?

Wole Soyinka