Quotes by South African Authors - Page 23

I do not claim to be a healer: only God is the Healer.
Phindiwe Nkosi
This is what healing demands. Behavior that is hurtful, shameful, abusive, or demeaning must be brought into the fierce light of truth, and truth can be brutal.
Desmond Tutu
I am shedding.I am not a new me.I am my old me in my new me.I remain, carved with the soul of my knife.My mess scattered all over my countenance. I am me. Take me as I am.
Malebo Sephodi
What you allow inside of you will settle there unless you find an effective way to work it out.
Malebo Sephodi
Always distance yourself from gossip, because it is the worst form of self-disruption.
Gift Gugu Mona
And... Know thyself Know Know
Malebo Sephodi
Never offer unsolicited advice. The receiver might not know that you are smarter than him.
C.J. Langenhoven
To be a better cook, cook more. To be a better writer, read more.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Never underestimate the value of advice from anyone, whether they are younger or older than you. Wisdom is not categorised under age
Unarine Ramaru
It is a sign of arrogance to be mad at someone for not acting as per your advice, especially if it was unsolicited.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Never take advice from a donkey.
Bryce Courtenay
There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.
Nelson Mandela
Death is really the mystery of life, isn't it?
Nadine Gordimer
There was something about the story she told us...that didn't seem right to him. He didn't buy the idea they'd been lovers. He reckoned it was something else. It's the sort of thing he used to pick up on, when I worked with him. You know as well as I do, sir, in a case like this you collect all sorts of facts, but only a few really matter, and Mr Madden had a gift for spotting them. Not that he always knew why: often it was just something he felt - a sort of instinct, I suppose - though he would have said it was simply a matter of paying attention. That's what he used to tell me.
Rennie Airth
There’s an undeniable thrill about meeting a stranger and spending a few hours together, indulging in each other’s lives. It’s that spurt of saying whatever you want and leaving it behind with someone who’ll never look at you and think of it again.
Danielle Esplin
My heart is an empty refrigerator.
J.T. Lawrence
We preoccupy ourselves with what we had — or what we want to have — at the expense of what we have.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I love silent conversations accompanied by a soft caress on my skin and my head on your chest listening to your heart desires.
Nomthandazo Tsembeni
They have been taught nothing but destruction and learned nothing except that a man's desires can be achieved simply by killing anybody who stands in his way.
Wilbur Smith
I just don't understand why those who fail to listen to others possess a habitual desire to be listened to.
Gugu Mona
Employment is the exploitation of the employer’s courage, and, the employed’s fear of failure.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A son is an unfulfilled man’s last attempt to fulfill his unfulfilled dreams.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To fail, try to please your critics. To please your critics, try to fail.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Miracles' rely on their observer’s ignorance. 'Perfection' relies on the observer’s failure to notice the observed’s defects.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There is nothing wrong with being wrong.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Without doing one cannot fail. But one cannot succeed either.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The fear of failure is a liability.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Giving up doesn't make you a quiter, a loser or a failure.It makes you wise enough to stop holding on to what refuses to be held.Hence i say, letting go hurts,but holding on to what is no longer therehurts even more.
Nomthandazo Tsembeni
If you employed a strategy that is not conducive to the results you are looking for, then you will not achieve the desired result. You have to understand that it’s not you that failed; it’s just that you employed the wrong strategy.
Julian Pencilliah
A social critic is someone whose work revolves around where and how our successes are failing us.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Success is not for everyone, but if everyone had a phobia of failure, success was going to be a common thing.
Unarine Ramaru
Jealousy is not there to encourage you to make someone fail, but there to encourage one to do more than the one they envy.
Unarine Ramaru
Art becomes an honest expression once done for oneself. Failure of that results to empty and transparent art.
Unarine Ramaru
You won't lose anything admitting that you've failed or you are struggling just remember not to dwell on that reality.
Unarine Ramaru
Most people do not want much. All they want is to be envied by most people.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.
Trevor Noah
They may have told you that you are useless but I am here to give you a better report about you: You are not a mistake. You have the potential to do what you were born to do. Yes, you are not a failure! Know that God values you and He is on your side.
D.S Mashego
The body, I had been taught, wants only to live. Suicide, I had understood, is an act not of the body against itself but of the will against the body. Yet here I beheld a body that was going to die rather than change its nature.
J.M. Coetzee
Like my loved one, I am convinced that we all have critical conditions. Battles that we undertake behind the hospitals, in lonely alleys, secret locations and sometimes public places that are out of reach to those who seem to care.
Phindiwe Nkosi
The life I've livedWhat more can one ask forApart from a grand exitSlit of the wristTotal bliss
Nomzamo Nhlumayo
Carved deep into my veins but didn't bleedOverdosed on sleeping pills but didn't sleepWhen your heart is heavy, it gets increasingly harder to breatheClearly there's a GodBut why has he forsaken me?
Nomzamo Nhlumayo
Discussions about the ethics of suicide are immediately biased by the verb that customarily attaches to it in English. One "commits" suicide. Because this presupposes the wrongfulness of the suicide, I avoid that verb, opting instead for "carry out" suicide. This is evaluatively neutral, avoiding both the usual bias against suicide and the unusual bias in favor of it that the verb "achieve" would effect. "Carry out" is preferable to "practice", which implies something ongoing. Finally, "carry out" also implies a suicide that is completed rather than merely attempted.
David Benatar
Those who take their own lives, especially when the quality of those lives is much less bad than those of the cancer patient or the concentration camp prisoner, fly in the face of the normal will to live. They are seen as abnormal, not merely in the statistical sense of being unusual, but of being defective, either morally or psychologically.
David Benatar
Although they will miss his presence if he dies, his condition is too burdensome to require his continued presence. In such circumstances, what is selfish is the insistence that the prospective suicide remain alive, not that he seek his own demise. The argument about selfishness can backfire in another way. Just as it is sometimes the case that those who kill themselves have accorded insufficient weight to the interests of others, so it is sometimes the case that those who do not kill themselves make this error. Consistent with what I have already said, I do not think that the interests of others are decisive. Nevertheless, there are situations in which a person's interest in continued life is negligible, because he will die soon anyway, and the quality of his life is appalling. If seeing out his days, rather than taking his own life earlier, would spell financial ruin for his family (because of the costs of his medical care), then it may well be unduly selfish not to take one's own life.
David Benatar
It is not the case that one can create new people on the assumption that if they are not pleased to have come into existence they can simply kill themselves. Once somebody has come into existence and attachments with that person have been formed, suicide can cause the kind of pain that makes the pain of childlessness mild by comparison. Somebody contemplating suicide knows (or should know) this. This places an important obstacle in the way of suicide. One’s life may be bad, but one must consider what affect ending it would have on one’s family and friends. There will be times when life has become so bad that it is unreasonable for the interests of the loved ones in having the person alive to outweigh that person’s interests in ceasing to exist. When this is true will depend in part on particular features of the person for whom continued life is a burden. Different people are able to bear different magnitudes of burden. It may even be indecent for family members to expect that person to continue living. On other occasions one’s life may be bad but not so bad as to warrant killing oneself and thereby making the lives of one’s family and friends still much worse than they already are.
David Benatar
This is not to offer a general recommendation of suicide. Suicide, like death from other causes, makes the lives of those who are bereaved much worse. Rushing into one’s own suicide can have profound negative impact on the lives of those close to one. Although an Epicurean may be committed to not caring about whathappens after his death, it is still the case that the bereaved suffer a harm even if the deceased does not. That suicide harms those who are thereby bereaved is part of the tragedy of coming into existence. We find ourselves in a kind of trap. We have already come into existence. To end our existence causes immense pain to those we love and for whom we care. Potential procreators would do well to consider this trap they lay when they produce offspring.
David Benatar
The presence of confidence can make an unable man appear able. While its absence can make an able man appear unable.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One asset every leader, shouldn't risk anything to lose at all cost, is team confidence.
Unarine Ramaru
In the light of His example we can see, in the faith of His power we too can prove, that suffering is to God’s child the token of the Father’s love, and the channel of His richest blessing. [. . .]Suffering is the way of the rent veil, the new and living way Jesus walked in and opened for us.
Andrew Murray
Help me to get my eyes off my suffering and onto you, God.
Shirley Corder
If life really begins at forty, then all poor people die in their teens.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
you must never blame other people for what you Going through because it will teach you a lesson and that time you have to be gratefull
siphesihle manzini
We pledge ourselves to liberate all our people from the continuing bondage of poverty, deprivation, suffering, gender and other discrimination.
Nelson Mandel
t— This world is full of trouble, umfundisi.—tWho knows it better?—tYet you believe?tKumalo looked at him under the light of the lamp. I believe, he said, but I have learned that it is a secret. Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering. There is my wife, and you, my friend, and these people who welcomed me, and the child who is so eager to be with us here in Ndotsheni – so in my suffering I can believe.— I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering.Kumalo looked at his friend with joy. You are a preacher, he said.
Alan Paton
If history really forever repeats itself: then, it has always been then.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere.
J.M. Coetzee
In her 20′s, a woman’s breasts double her self-esteem. In her 40′s, they halve it.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life entertains humble men by giving men with below average looks (intellect, knowledge, etc.) an above average self-esteem.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
*I’m hustling* is a low self-esteem having man’s way of saying *I’m unemployed,* when answering a seemingly materialistic woman’s question as to what he does for a living.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Life ups the self-esteem of a low-paid man by giving him things that the high-paid man that he envies cannot buy (intellect, looks, sex appeal, etc.).
Mokokoma Mokhonoana