“For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.”

In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest, there is a leaf that falls.

Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.

It is my belief that the only power which can resist the power of fear is the power of love.

Such development has only one true name, and that is exploitation.

Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools

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.

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.

The whole force of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing it if lost or abandoned, was against me.

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

God knew where he was, but he asked so as to start a conversation with Adam and avoid startling him too much to reply.

Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

I knew the risk. To me, it’s not an ego thing. I enjoy coaching. I enjoy helping people achieve something.

Personally, I’d never seen a graphic novel. I knew they existed because friends of mine like Jonathan Ross collect them and some very literate and intelligent people really rate the graphic novel as a form.

I knew it was time to get off of reality TV when someone asked me if I sang as well as acted.