“All men have one refuge, a good friend, with whom you can weep and know that he does not smile.”

Marriage, if one will face the truth, is an evil, but a necessary evil.

Hope saves a person in the midst of misfortunes.

Man must be prepared for every event of life, for there is nothing that is durable.

The good man makes others good.

No man alive can say, This shall not happen to me.

The truth sometimes not sought for comes forth to the light.

I call a fig a fig, a spade a spade.

Of all wild beasts on earth or in sea, the greatest is a woman.

Being mortal, never pray for an untroubled life. Rather, ask the God to give you an enduring heart.

There are many wild beasts on land and in the sea, but the beastliest of all is woman.

It must be that evil communications corrupt good dispositions.

Sleep is a healing balm for every ill.

Know thyself means this, that you get acquainted with what you know, and what you can do.

Do not fight against Providence; nor bring more heavy weather to the storm. Face what is already there.

It is as easy to draw back a stone thrown with force from the hand, as to recall a word once spoken.

To live is not to live for one’s self; let us help one another.

We have known the bitterness of defeat and the exultation of triumph, and from both we have learned there can be no turning back. We must go forward to preserve in peace what we won in war. A new era is upon us.

And even in terms of justice, law codes, the legal system. A person who does not know English in Africa is excluded from that system because he can only operate through acts of translation.

I know of only three people who really understand money. A professor at another university. One of my students. And a rather junior clerk at the Bank of England.

I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people.

Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then know that something is after its life.

In a country like South Africa, writers have nuisance value, because those of us who have become known overseas have certainly helped to inform people about what life is like there.

As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

I am not even alive enough to know how to kill myself