Akinwande Oluwole Babatunde Soyinka known popularly as Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian playwright, poet and essayist. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in literature, the first African to be honoured in that category.
Soyinka has been a strong critic of successive Nigerian governments, especially the country’s many military dictators, as well as other political tyrannies, including the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe.
Wole Soyinka is among contemporary Africa’s greatest writers. He is also one of the continent’s most imaginative advocates of native culture and of the humane social order it embodies. Below are few of his quotes to inspire you:
1. A tiger does not shout its tigritude, it pounces
2. Just like birds, Hunters know no borders
3. And I believe that the best learning process of any kind of craft is just to look at the work of others.
4. Education is lacking in most of those who pontificate.
5. But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That’s all.
6. But when you’re deprived of it for a lengthy period then you value human companionship. But you have to survive and so you devise all kinds of mental exercises and it’s amazing.
7. The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.
8. The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail
9. 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.
10. No human is completely fearless.
11. 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.
12. The phenomenon of creativity, we know, is closely related to the ability to yoke together separate, and even seemingly incompatible, matrices.
13. Don’t take shadows too seriously. Reality is your only safety. Continue to reject illusion.
14. I said: “A tiger does not proclaim his tigritude, he pounces”. In other words: a tiger does not stand in the forest and say: “I am a tiger”. When you pass where the tiger has walked before, you see the skeleton of the duiker, you know that some tigritude has been emanated there.
15. There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people.
16. The man dies in all those that keep silent.
17. Mythology can be used, and has been used, even to re-state, you know, the very urgent problems of the world.
18. Romance is the sweetening of the soul With fragrance offered by the stricken heart.
19. No man beholds his mother’s womb Yet who denies it’s there? Coiled To the navel of the world is that Endless cord that links us all To the great Origin. If I lose my way. The trailing cord will bring me to the roots.
20. If man cannot, what god dare claim perfection?
21. Be yourself. Ultimately just be yourself.
22. No one is rich enough to buy yesterday but if you Hustle enough tomorrow could be yours
23. Weak people revenge, strong people forgive, intelligent people ignore.
24. When I say war, I’m not talking about mental war; I’m talking about totally eliminating the obstacles to transformation of our children.
25. The youth should come together to challenge the status quo. They must not give up.
