“Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”

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

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

Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless.

The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening.

The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.

It is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.

When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost.

It is not fickle, but because it has mothered not only men, but races, and cradles not only cities, but civilizations – and seen them die, and seen new ones born again – Africa can be dispassionate, indifferent, warm, or cynical, replete with the weariness of too much wisdom.

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.

It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.

We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours.

Never complain, about the number of hours you have put in, to do a job,

Don’t you just love these long rainy afternoons in New Orleans when an hour isn’t just an hour — but a little bit of eternity dropped in your hands — and who knows what to do with it?

Your nobility must estimate how much of you Was put into each hour of your daily work

I’ve had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.

Same with golf: pick up a club. But not many can go out and get in a race car and experience a drive at over 200 miles an hour.

My wife doesn’t even want to spend 2 hours with me.