“Even beat, can ever hope to experience it, except only as a bystander might experience a Masai war dance knowing nothing of its music nor the meaning of its steps.”

A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again, wherever he is, or wherever he hoped to be.

In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing. There is the silence that comes with morning in a forest, and this is different from the silence of a sleeping city.

It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy.

I know animals more gallant than the African warthog, but none more courageous. He is the peasant of the plains – the drab and dowdy digger in the earth.

Success feeds confidence.

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend.

You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.

In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favors that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned.

I look at my yesterdays for months past, and find them as good a lot of yesterdays as anybody might want. I sit there in the firelight and see them all.

A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.

I have a trunk containing continents.

At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.

Success breeds confidence.

Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.

A map says to you, ‘Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.’ It says, ‘I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.

Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.

How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

Now the answer … is plain, but it is so unpalatable that most men will not face it. There is no reason for life and life has no meaning.

It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.

A sense of life meaning ensues but cannot be deliberately pursued: life meaning is always a derivative phenomenon that materializes when we have transcended ourselves.

Except for memory, time would have no meaning at all.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.