“But what do they help if one seeks for counsel, for one cries this, and one cries that, and another cries something that is neither this nor that.”

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.

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

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.

Knowin’ all about baseball is just about as profitable as bein’ a good whittler.

Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes pure and simple slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.

Tomorrow is another day, we rather hope it will be better but better it won’t be unless self-foibles are examined.

I have ever held it as a maxim never to do that through another which it was impossible for me to execute myself.

Another dead body. Every year it is the same. Every year, another dead body.

We can have unity in diversity and diversity in unity. We don’t have to be like one another to enjoy sisterhood.

No one is more cherished in this world than someone who lightens the burden of another. Thank you.

The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure reduces one to a kind of equality which spoils the unutterable charms that come from despotism.