Quotes by Zimbabwean Authors - Page 40

Realise your Stewardship role as a parent – you raise children to offer a quality gift to society. Even your spouse should not be treated as an object or possession you own; support them to be the best of what they were created to be. Do your part and trust God for the rest. If you have empowered them, trust them to be responsible.
Archibald Marwizi
Empower your children - Allow self-discovery and self-awareness (their own key to success), Facilitate an environment for learning through experience (practice of knowledge acquired). Remember, this exploration will take place whether you approve or not – it’s inevitable, that’s why YOU MUST be in charge of providing awareness and exposure to improve the quality of decisions made during exploration and experimentation.
Archibald Marwizi
Having a succession and legacy plan in place will make you ready for forced changes due to circumstances beyond your control, like death, any form of incapacity, sudden changes in laws and regulations and even corporate scandals and moral failure.
Archibald Marwizi
Passing the baton - Oh what a challenge this has proven to be in many societies, families, businesses, governments, religious organizations and obviously in every other relay race! Why do this? - for starters, you will not live forever – how about that? After a given mileage, even a car will need new tyres!
Archibald Marwizi
Leadership success means your mission and vision must outlive you, but this will not happen by accident. We have enough stories around us to prove that lasting legacies have to be well managed, planned and structured for continuity. If not, you will carry your name, success and influence to the grave, only leaving short-lived memories of your achievements and impact.
Archibald Marwizi
Start planning from your internal or spiritual view of things. The external view always has a way of distorting, discouraging and limiting your dream.
Archibald Marwizi
When you have pictured and defined your desired legacy, allow your present life activities and efforts to begin reflecting the future you desire. Begin to do what you want to see, become involved in the causes you want to be a part of. Show your legatees how you want and expect things to be done after you are gone. This will enable them to fit the vision into their own as they make their own individual unique mark.
Archibald Marwizi
A leader, who divides his own people, contaminates his platform and begins to destroy his own territory.
Archibald Marwizi
Honesty is doing what you know or believe is right. Integrity is doing what is right and truthful.
Roy Bennett
The problem is not lack of leadership, the problem is lack of good leadership
Lazarus Takawira
Diplomacy in leadership is winning the war on behalf of both sides
Lazarus Takawira
Mr Mandela, who had given his whole life for justice and had never once thought of himself. How unlike these people were modern politicians, who thought only of power and tricks.
Alexander McCall Smith
Great leadership is a reflection of honest service
Lazarus Takawira
The spotlight does not change a person, it simply reveals what one has mastered in the darkness
Lazarus Takawira
I am sorry, I was wrong and it’s my fault, these are words only accustomed to humble leadership
Lazarus Takawira
No matter how much you water the ground, if the ground holds no seed then no plant is coming out. Don’t expect the plant to come out unless you have sown the seed
Lazarus Takawira
Love is the fertile ground that allows obedience to sprout & flourish
Lazarus Takawira
Wisdom is the ability to ignore foolishness
Lazarus Takawira
PRUNING can be PAINFUL yet it brings PROSPERITY
Lazarus Takawira
Selfish leadership is okay with the failure of the successor so as to ensure that any form of praise will continue to be heaped on them
Lazarus Takawira
We are not just the leaders of tomorrow. Leadership is not a destination, leadership is a lifetime journey
Lazarus Takawira
Good leaders have vision and inspire others to help them turn vision into reality. Great leaders have vision, share vision, and inspire others to create their own.
Roy Bennett
Mr. J.L.B Matekoni," she asked, "do you think that our souls grow as we get older?"He did not answer immediately, but when he did, she thought his answer quite perfect. "Yes," he said. "Our souls get wider. They grow like the branches of a tree--growing outwards. And more birds come and make their homes in these branches. And sing a bit more." He stopped and looked a little awkward. "I'm talking nonsense, Mma.""You're not," she said.
Alexander McCall Smith
She was proud of her build, which was in accordance with the old Botswana ideas of beauty, and she would not pander to the modern idea of slenderness. That was an importation from elsewhere, and it was simply wrong. How could a very thin woman do all the things that women needed to do: to carry children on their backs, to pound maize into flour out at the lands or the cattle post, to cart around the things of the household—the pots and pans and buckets of water? And how could a thin woman comfort a man? It would be very awkward for a man to share his bed with a person who was all angles and bone, whereas a traditionally built lady would be like an extra pillow on which a man coming home tired from his work might rest his weary head. To do all that you needed a bit of bulk, and thin people simply did not have that.
Alexander McCall Smith
That was what counted, she told herself: those unexpected moments of appreciation, unanticipated glimpses of beauty or kindness - any of the things that attached us to this world, that made us forget, even for a moment, its pain and its transience.
Alexander McCall Smith
Change is a friend to a life with a vision, but an enemy to an aimless person.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
When you choose to act on your problems, you cease to be a victim of circumstance and become a force of change; that's when you transition to not only being a survivor, but to being a leader or hero too, and an inspiration to those still in the victim's mindset.
Innocent Mwatsikesimbe
What is happening is something new in my life. I think many people have a sense of shape, of unfolding, in their lives. This sense makes it possible for them to say: Yes, this new person is important to me: he, or she, is the beginning of something I must live through. Or: This emotion, which I have not felt before, is not the alien I believed it to be. It will now be part of me and I must deal with it.It is easy now, looking back over my life to say: That Anna, in that time, was such and such a person. And then, five years later, she was such and such. A year, two years, five years of a certain kind of being can be rolled up and tucked away, or ‘named’ — yes, during that time I was like that. Well now I am in the middle of such a period, and when it is over I shall glance back at it casually and say: Yes, that’s what I was.
Doris Lessing
Running and chanting, the word change in the air like it's something you can grab and put in your mouth and sink your teeth into.
NoViolet Bulawayo
We shall change all that...because it is possible to change the world, if one is determined enough, and if one sees with sufficient clarity just what has to be changed.
Alexander McCall Smith
Generally the men always tried to appear strong; they walked tall, heads upright, arms steady at the sides, and feet firmly planted like trees. Solid, Jericho walls of men. But when they went out in the bush to relieve themselves and nobody was looking, the fell apart like crumbling towers and wept with the wretched grief of forgotten concubines.And when they returned to the presence of their women and children and everybody else, they stuck hands deep inside torn pockets until they felt their dry thighs, kicked little stones out of the way, and erected themselves like walls again, but then the women, who knew all the ways of weeping and all there was to know about falling apart, would not be deceived; they gently rose from the hearths, beat dust off their skirts, and planted themselves like rocks in front of their men and children and shacks, and only then did all appear almost tolerable.
NoViolet Bulawayo
We all know that it is women who take the decisions, but we have to let men think that the decisions are theirs. It is an act of kindness on the part of women.
Alexander McCall Smith
What I feel now doesn't matter at all? But at what point am I entitled to say to myself, what I am feeling now is valid? After all, Anna-' Here Tommy turned to face her: 'one can't go through one's whole life in phases. There must be a goal somewhere.' His eyes gleamed out hatred; and it was with difficulty that Anna said: 'If you're suggesting that I've reached a goal, and I'm judging you from some superior point, then it's not true.''Phases,' he insisted. 'Stages. Growing pains.''But I think that's how women see-people. Certainly their own children. In the first place, there's always been nine months of not knowing whether the baby would be a girl or a boy. Sometimes I wonder what Janet would have been like if she'd been born a boy. Don't you see! And then babies go through one stage after another, and then they are children. When a woman looks at a child she sees all the things he's been at the same time. When I look at Janet sometimes I see her as a small baby and I feel her inside my belly and I see her as various sizes of small girl, all at the same time.' Tommy's stare was accusing and sarcastic, but she persisted: 'That's how women see things. Everything in a sort of continuous creative stream-well, isn't it natural we should?
Doris Lessing
Teachers were not allowed to beat children as they did in the past, although, Mma Ramotswe reflected, there were some boys-and indeed some young men-who might have been greatly improved by moderate physical correction. The apprentices, for example: would it help if Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni resorted to physical chastisement-nothing severe, of course-but just an occasional kick in the seat of the pants while they were bending over to change a tyre or something like that? The thought made her smile. She would even offer to administer the kick herself, which she imagined might be oddly satisfying, as one of the apprentices, the one who still kept on about girls, had a largeish bottom which she thought would be quite comfortable to kick. How enjoyable it would be to creep up behind him and kick him when he was least expecting it, and then to say: Let that be a lesson! That was all one would have to say, but it would be a blow for women everywhere.
Alexander McCall Smith
In fact I've reached the stage where I look at people and say - he or she, they are whole at all because they've chosen to block off at this stage or that. People stay sane by blocking off, by limiting themselves.
Doris Lessing
The rainbow’s colors are hidden in the storm.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The darkest part of the storm paints the brightest part of the rainbow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A book is the only vehicle that can take you around the world in one hour.
Matshona Dhliwayo
To be knowledgeable, sit before scholars; to be wise, sit before life.
Matshona Dhliwayo
You don’t choose the music your enemies play, but you choose which songs you dance to.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Yesterday, I was clever, I wanted to be rich. Today, I am wise, I want to be happy.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The world accommodates you for fitting in, but only rewards you for standing out.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When excellence comes in at the door, failure flies out the window.
Matshona Dhliwayo
God hides treasure in dirt, so that only those humble enough to dig through it find it.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Smile, just to infuriate those who envy you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Your deepest scars tell the world of your greatest triumphs.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When people try to bury you, remind yourself you are a seed.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If you have the power to put a smile on one person’s face, you have the power to change the world.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Be like seeds; do not see dirt thrown at you as your enemy, but as ground to grow.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When people try to pull you down, remember, they had to look up to do so.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Thoughts are powerful; before you were born, you were one.
Matshona Dhliwayo
The beauty all around you is insignificant in comparison to the beauty within you.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When you look up and don’t see the stars, the universe may have cleared the sky for you to replace them.
Matshona Dhliwayo
While the whole world was asleep, the caterpillar was awake, working towards becoming a butterfly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
A rose does not answer its enemies with words, but with beauty.
Matshona Dhliwayo
If seeds despaired in their darkest hours, they would never rise to enjoy their brightest days.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Darkness is a prison from which only light escapes.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Today’s storms usher in tomorrow’s sunshine.
Matshona Dhliwayo
When a rock transforms into a diamond, lesser stones will not speak of its beauty, but speak of its unpolishedness.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Roses do not bloom hurriedly; for beauty, like any masterpiece, takes time to blossom.
Matshona Dhliwayo