17 quotes
We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place.
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958)
Men are never alone because that which, acknowledged or unacknowledged, dreams through them is always by their side.
By chance (to use the only phrase we have for describing one of the most significant manifestations of life).
The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958)
Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril.
Venture to the Interior (1951)
Of all man's inborn dispositions there is none more heroic than the love in him. Everything else accepts defeat and dies, but love will fight no-love every inch of the way.
Flamingo Feather (1955)
It is the not-yet in the now,
The taste of fruit that does not-yet exist
Hanging the blossom on the bough.
Venture to the Interior (1951)
There is a way in which the collective knowledge of mankind expresses itself, for the finite individual, through mere daily living: a way in which life itself is sheer knowing.
Venture to the Interior (1951)
This is the story of a journey in a great wasteland and a search for some pure remnant of the unique and almost vanished First People of my native land, the Bushmen of Africa.
The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958)
Somehow we should learn to know that our problems are our most precious possessions. They are the raw materials of our salvation: no problem — no redemption.
A Walk with a White Bushman (1986)
Africa has always walked in my mind proudly upright, an African giant among the other continents, toes well dug into the final ocean of one hemisphere, rising to its full height in the graying skies of the other; head and shoulders broad, square and enduring, making light of the bagful of blue Mediterranean slung over its back as it marches patiently through time.
Flamingo Feather (1955)
The man of the Kalahari is Esau and we are Jacob, and there is a great gulf between us. This sense of property, of possession that we have is utterly foreign to the Esaus of the world. We have, he is.
A Walk with a White Bushman (1986)
What is most threatening and destructive in human society today is the human being who is split in his own nucleus: it is the fission in the modern soul which makes nuclear fission so dangerous — he is a split atom. He has got to heal himself, make himself whole.
A Walk with a White Bushman (1986)
The buffalo's powerful head darkening the yellow grass...has more of the quintessential Africa in it for me than any other manifestation of all the scores of animals that I know and love.
The educating of the parents is really the education of the child: children tend to live what is unlived in the parents, so it is vital that parents should be aware of their inferior, their dark side, and should press on getting to know themselves.
A Walk with a White Bushman (1986)
The buffalo's powerful head darkening the yellow grass, like the lion's imperative roar and the elephant's long, somnambulistic stride, has more of the quintessential Africa in it for me than any other manifestation of all the scores of animals that I know and love.
Flamingo Feather (1955)
The spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird.
A Walk with a White Bushman (1986)