Laurens Van der Post

Life begins as a quest of the child for the man and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child

Organized religion is making Christianity political rather than making politics Christian

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.

I suspect it was...the old story of the implacable necessity of a man having honour within his own natural spirit.  A man cannot live and temper his mettle without such honour.  There is deep in him a sense of the heroic quest; and our modern way of life, with its emphasis on security, its distrust of the unknown and its elevation of abstract collective values has repressed the heroic impulse to a degree that may produce the most dangerous consequences.

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.

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.