Quotes by South African Authors - Page 35

Peace is not just the absence of conflict; peace is the creation of an environment where all can flourish regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, class, caste or any other social markers of difference.
Nelson Mandela
You have to make peace with the fact that you have the right to be here, not because you have what it takes, but because your existence was authorised by the heavens.
D.S Mashego
Money brings about personal convenience rather than personal satisfaction or fulfilment. It will entertain you but it will never give you true peace. Money will buy you the most expensive house but it will never give you a peaceful sleep.
D.S Mashego
Peace is a very powerful approach than war, choose peace when solving any problem in the world.
Gift Gugu Mona
It seemed to me that all things were possible on the island, all tyrannies and cruelties, though in small; and if, in despite of what was possible, we lived at peace with another, surely this was proof that certain laws unknown to us held sway, or else that we had been following the promptings of our hearts all this time, and our hearts had not betrayed us.
J.M. Coetzee
The ocean fascinates me too. How it connects everything and everyone, but at the same time it divides us. It’s a mystery, full of life and possibilities. It’s just…phenomenal.
Danielle Esplin
Culture is a symbolic veil with which we hide our animal nature from ourselves … and other animals.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Wearing a smile while claiming to not judge and condemn people as you equate their nature with no less than a carnal and immoral act rather than as understanding their orientation and identity as an intrinsic part of who they are doesn't lessen the harshness and cruelty of that rejection.
Christina Engela
Everybody is unique and different. Nobody is the same as anyone else. there is no 'normal' - it is a lie taught to us by a system so flawed that it is threatened by the awesome diversity of nature.
Christina Engela
Voting on things is democratic, yes - but not on deciding on whether or not people should be equal or have human rights. That isn't democracy, it is mob rule.Everybody should be equal in a democracy - that is the nature of a democracy.
Christina Engela
Everybody should be equal in a democracy - that is the nature of a democracy.
Christina Engela
First smile!! An unseasonal little shower of rain fell here, and a lot of butterflies drowned, so we put them in the sun and they came back to life, and flew up and then Agaat SMILED!
Marlene Van Niekerk
Everything is important. To the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree, the deepest stone in the drift.
Marlene Van Niekerk
Life (like love) is forgiving and hopeful and, like a bold flower pushing out from the narrow crevice in a rock, will take any gap we allow. However small or large.
Sally Andrew
I felt the full breadth and depth of the ocean around the sphere of the Earth, back billions of years to the beginning of life, across all the passing lives and deaths, the endless waves of swimming joy and quiet losses of exquisite creatures with fins and fronds, tentacles and wings, colourful and transparent, tiny and huge, coming and going. There is nothing the ocean has not seen
Sally Andrew
The Hammer was a hard man, a smart man too, and he took pride in always having a plan ‘b’. For those troubling occasions when plan ‘b’ didn’t work, he would strive to also have a plan ‘c’ in place. In short, he was the kind of man who always had something up his sleeve besides his funny bone. The pilot, his trusted second man gave him a worried look. “What do we do now?
Christina Engela
The famous split windowSplits had the KDF dash until 1953, which had two glove compartments. Note rear “w” bonnet and small round taillights. There were no indicators like today’s cars – just pop-up indicators that work with an electric servo, called ‘trafficators’ or ‘semaphores’. 6v electrics. Small, flat front windscreen.
Christina Engela
Ramalama was moving higher in the sky already, the day was getting on. He was going to be late getting to San Fedora for his meeting with the Sheriff. And as a bounty hunter – even a good one with a lot of work, time is money. It seemed today that time was running out for Beck the Badfeller.
Christina Engela
When at work, be diligent because there are many people who wish they had your job, but they couldn't since you are the one who got.
Gift Gugu Mona
Prayer not only teaches and strengthens one for work, work teaches and strengthens one for prayer.
Andrew Murray
The employed are punished by having to do what they do not love. The self-employed are punished by the opposite.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A recurrent question about photography is how much self expression it allows the photographer. There are two standard positions, each corresponding to a different location oh photographic skill. The opposition is neatly summed up in Bioy Casares’s novel The Adventures of a Photographer in La Plata (1989). The hero Nicolasito Almanza declares: ‘I am convinced that all of photography depends on the moment we press the release […] I believe that you’re a photographer if you know exactly when to press the release.’ In making this declaration he is responding to the opinion expressed by Mr Gruter, owner of a photographic laboratory: ‘[…] sometimes I wonder if the true work of the photographer doesn’t begin in the dark room, amid the trays and the enlarger.
Clive Scott
There is more to life than making a living. Do not work more than you live.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
One day, I was on the front lawn of the property and aimed the gun at a sparrow perched high in a tree. Hazel Goldreich, Arthur's wife, was watching me and jokingly remarked that I would never hit the target. But she had hardly finished the sentence when the sparrow fell to the ground. I turned to her and was about to boast, when the Goldreichs' son Paul, then about five years old, turned to me with tears in his eyes and said, "David, why did you kill that bird? Its mother will be sad." My mood immediately shifted from one of pride to shame; I felt that this small boy had far more humanity than I did. It was an odd sensation for a man who was the leader of a nascent guerrilla army.
Nelson Mandela
It is a remarkable feat to be able to see past the inhumanity of the behavior and recognize the humanity of the person committing the atrocious acts. This is not weakness. This is heroic strength, the noblest strength of the human spirit.
Desmond Tutu
Man is an extremely complex creature: he usually acts in an unselfish manner for selfish reasons.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The most rewarding times are those spent in changing lives for the sake of humanity.
Gift Gugu Mona
How in any way does EQUALITY with other people equate to 'religious persecution'? Does the survival of a religion depend on the vilification and desecration of the humanity of others?
Christina Engela
It should be made clear that religious freedom DOES NOT include the right to persecute others, nor the right to take away their humanity and equal treatment before the law.
Christina Engela
You show your humanity by how you see yourself not as apart from others but from your connection to others.
Desmond Tutu
If you are neutral in times of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Desmond Tutu
Humanity is when the society is able to care, protect and value one another.
Gift Gugu Mona
Poverty deprives humanity of the basic necessities to live a meaningful life.
Gift Gugu Mona
To deny people of their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.
Nelson Mandela
Still, I never heard him say that he hated or wanted to hurt or kill someone for all the horrific things that had been happening to him and his family.
Savo Heleta
There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.
Alan Paton
History is a succession of things that ought never to have happened, and the writing act is a kind of revenge against this.
Breyten Breytenbach
How anyone can vote to support any form of fascism, knowing history, is beyond me - which leads me to draw the conclusion that either the people who voted to support it don't know what they are doing - or that they know exactly what they are doing.
Christina Engela
As a South African I honestly cannot understand how people can't see South Africa as a unique nation, untied by ties of history, bonds of suffering, victory, struggles, hope - and in more ways than I ever before thought possible - blood.
Christina Engela
Apparently some people (who don't know history) seem to think that marriage 'always has been' exclusively between males and females - and that this modern inequality somehow justifies the enforced continuation of this inequality.
Christina Engela
South African history did not start in 1652.
Nick Wood
The original KDF-wagen as it was called was basic and rudimentary, but essentially the same as the later post war production cars that followed. Features of this vehicle included cable operated brakes (!!) and a tiny 800cc flat four motor with a single exhaust, 16 inch tires and the KDF twin glove compartment (without lids) dash.Oh, and last but not least – probably the most famous and sought-after rear window in automotive history!
Christina Engela
We learn from history that we don't learn from history!
Desmond Tutu
We learn from history that we don't learn from history!
Desmond Tutu
We can do away with ignorance, if we take it upon ourselves to encourage each other to use our intelligence.
Unarine Ramaru
I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.
Elon Musk
Intelligence reports and local folklore together perpetuated tales of his bloody adventures across the rim worlds and badlands of Terran space. It was his trademark and often over the last two decades, history proclaimed in large bloody letters that ‘Kilroy woz ‘ere.
Christina Engela
At forty two years, Sona Kilroy stood tall and strapping, a powerful figure. Rising to the rank of Admiral in the Corsair fleet was no easy feat. It took intelligence, talent, determination, resilience, creative thinking, brute force, and sheer cunning to achieve – and perhaps also a large slice of luck.
Christina Engela
If e-book readers were invented before print books, (petty things such as) the smell of ink would have been some people’s only reason for not abandoning e-books.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We sometimes reveal how ignorant or bored we were when we read a book by giving it 5-stars.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Because books saved my life, literally, I've become close to them
Malebo Sephodi
Some artists benefit less from being interviewed than they do from being left alone.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Planning is a skill and an art which takes a lifetime to master
Paddick Van Zyl
Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes.
J.M. Coetzee
Modern man has lost the sense of wonderabout the unknown and he treats it asan enemy.
Laurens van der Post
I am art. I am authentic. I am love. I am me.
Malebo Sephodi
Look within - there is no end!
Malebo Sephodi
An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos.
Lyall Watson
The only relevance worth to pursue, is living your passion through your interests.
Unarine Ramaru