“But the soul of Africa, its integrity, the slow inexorable pulse of its life, is its own and of such singular rhythm that no outsider, unless steeped from childhood in its endless.”

We swung over the hills and over the town and back again, and I saw how a man can be master of a craft, and how a craft can be master of an element. I saw the alchemy of perspective reduce my world, and all my other life, to grains in a cup.

Conformation … but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere – in men, in horses, and in women.

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.

There’s an old adage,” he said, “translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages — “Life is life and fun is fun, but it’s all so quiet when the goldfish die.

Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead.

A lovely horse is always an experience…. It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.

One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day that will be an airborne life.

We fly, but we have not ‘conquered’ the air. Nature presides in all her dignity, permitting us the study and the use of such of her forces as we may understand.

Nature having developed their bodies in one direction and their brains in another, while human beings, on the other hand, drew from Mr. Darwin’s lottery of evolution both the winning ticket and the stub to match it.

[The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.

If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.

You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself.

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing

I learned to watch, to put my trust in other hands than mine. And I learned to wander. I learned what every dreaming child needs to know — that no horizon is so far that you cannot get above it or beyond it.

After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work

[Elephants] are less agile and physically less adaptable than ourselves.

In true meditation the emphasis is on being awareness; not on being aware of objects, but on resting as primordial awareness itself. Primordial awareness is the source in which all objects arise and subside.

A few minutes ago, you knew who you were-you had a history and a personality-but from this place of not knowing, you question all of that.

As you rest into stillness more profoundly, awareness becomes free of the mind’s compulsive control, contractions, and identifications.

Awareness naturally returns to its non-state of absolute unmanifest potential, the silent abyss beyond all knowing.

Right now you can allow yourself to experience a very simple sense of not knowing – not knowing what or who you are, not knowing what this moment is, not knowing anything.

The door to God is the insecurity of not knowing anything. Bear the grace of that uncertainty and all wisdom will be yours.

The idea of perfection always gives one a chance to talk without knowing facts.

The necessity of knowing a little about a great many things is the most grievous burden of our day. It deprives us of leisure on the one hand, and of scholarship on the other.