“But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school.”

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.

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.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before. He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.

What is harder than rock, or softer than water? Yet soft water hollows out hard rock. Persevere.

It’s very hard to grow because it’s difficult to let go of the models of ourselves in which we’ve invested so heavily.

I fall in love every time. And I don’t really fall in love a lot, but when I do, I fall hard.

I’ve learned that it’s harder to hate up close.

It’s hard to hold the hand of anyone who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.

The hardest thing to learn in life is which bridge to cross and which to burn.