Laurens Van Der Post

Quotes

1. What is most threatening and destructive in human society today is the human being who is split in his own nucleus: it is the fission in the modern soul which makes nuclear fission so dangerous — he is a split atom. He has got to heal himself, make himself whole.

   p. 50

2. 

   Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.

3. 

   By chance (to use the only phrase we have for describing one of the most significant manifestations of life).

4. 

   It is the not-yet in the now,

   The taste of fruit that does not-yet exist

   Hanging the blossom on the bough.

5. 

   There is a way in which the collective knowledge of mankind expresses itself, for the finite individual, through mere daily living: a way in which life itself is sheer knowing.

6. 

   Somehow we should learn to know that our problems are our most precious possessions. They are the raw materials of our salvation: no problem — no redemption.

   p. 71

7. 

   This is the story of a journey in a great wasteland and a search for some pure remnant of the unique and almost vanished First People of my native land, the Bushmen of Africa.

8. 

   Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril.

9. 

   The spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird.

10. 

    The educating of the parents is really the education of the child: children tend to live what is unlived in the parents, so it is vital that parents should be aware of their inferior, their dark side, and should press on getting to know themselves.

    p. 49

11. 

    The man of the Kalahari is Esau and we are Jacob, and there is a great gulf between us. This sense of property, of possession that we have is utterly foreign to the Esaus of the world. We have, he is.

    p. 159

That’s all the quotes.

11 quotes in the collection · come back when we add more