“I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi.”

For who can stop the heart from breaking?

because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie.

The tragedy is that things are not mended again.

I envision someday a great, peaceful South Africa in which the world will take pride, a nation in which each of many different groups will be making its own creative contribution.

When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for?

Then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand.

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn’t concern the central issues, it wouldn’t be worth publishing.

Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret.

There is only one way in which one can endure man’s inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one’s own life, to exemplify man’s humanity to man.

The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.

Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools.

All roads lead to Johannesburg.

It was not his habit to dwell on what could have been, but what could never be.

St. Francis of Assisi taught me that there is a wound in the Creation and that the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.

Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens pages of these messengers of doom.

The only way in which one can make endurable man’s inhumanity to man.

Victory is the normal experience of a Christian; defeat should be the abnormal experience.

Negligence in prayer withers the inner man. Nothing can be a substitute for it, not even Christian work.

Actually, only God can satisfy a Christian’s heart; man cannot.

A Christian life is an unending engagement on the battlefield.

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

Truly, there is a Christian note which makes the whole World vibrate, like an immense gong, in the divine Christ. This note is unique and universal, and in it alone consists the Gospel.

For ninety per cent of those who view him from outside, the Christian God looks like a great landowner administering his estates, the world. Now this conventional picture, which is too well justified by appearances, corresponds in no way to the dogmatic basis or point of view of the Gospels.

As a Christian, I know my life is in God’s hands. He has a plan for me.