Yoruba Quotes

“Olofi made Oya . . . and then he realized he'd done and quickly made Oshun.”
― Karen E. Quinones Miller

“A religious person without no job is a dead person. (Iigbagbo ti koni ise oku ni. - Yoruba proverb)”
― Habeeb Akande

“In Africa every human has a spark of divine nature, and sin does not separate us from it. We are cousins of God. Every person has multiple souls, including the souls of ancestors that reincarnate through us. The purest soul is called an ori, and a person who cultivates their ori can attain divinity.”
― Israel Morrow, Gods of the Flesh: A Skeptic's Journey Through Sex, Politics and Religion

“Santería was traditionally an unacknowledged and underappreciated aspect of what it meant to be Cuban. Yet the syncretism between the Yoruban religion that the slaves brought to the island and the Catholicism of their masters is, in my opinion, the underpinning of Cuban culture. Every artistic realm--music, theater, literature, etc.--owes a huge debt to santería and the slaves who practiced it and passed it on, largely secretively, for generations.”
― Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban

“In West African traditions, land belongs to the person who works it. Produce belongs to the person who grows it. Whatever is created belongs to the creators—not to the God that created them, and certainly not to the colonist or slavemaster.”
― Israel Morrow, Gods of the Flesh: A Skeptic's Journey Through Sex, Politics and Religion

“Pronouns aside, there are also some languages that are essentially gender-free, containing very few words that make reference to a person’s “natural” gender at all. Yoruba, a language spoken in Nigeria, has neither gendered pronouns nor the dozens of gendered nouns we have in English, including son, daughter, host, hostess, hero, heroine, etc. Instead, the most important distinction in Yoruba is the age of the person you’re talking about. So, instead of saying brother and sister, you would say older sibling and younger sibling, or egbun and aburo. The only Yoruba words that make reference to a person’s gender (or sex, as it were) are obirin and okorin, meaning “one who has a vagina” and “one who has a penis.” So if you really wanted to call someone your sister, you would have to say egbon mi obirin, or “my older sibling, the one with the vagina.” When you get that specific, it makes our English obsession with immediately identifying people’s sexes seem just plain creepy.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“We are educated for whatever sake. For Nigeria to move forward, we must stop comparison and ignore religious views in dealing with sensitive issues that can make or mar our Country's existence. Evil, evil is evil, coming from either of the geopolitical regions. We were humans before we choose our religion.”
― Olawale Daniel

“A religious person without a job is dead. (Ìgbàgbọ́ ti ko níí ìṣe, òkú ní. - Yorùbá proverb)”
― Olawale Daniel

“We cannot see
The still great womb of the world -
No man beholds is 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.”
― Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman