Best 20 quotes of Laurens Van Der Post on MyQuotes

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

I hear people everywhere saying that the trouble with our time is that we have no great leaders any more. If we look back we always had them. But to me it seems there is a very profound reason why there are no great leaders any more. It is because they are no longer needed. The message is clear. You no longer want to be led from the outside. Every man must be his own leader. He now knows enough not to follow other people. He must follow the light that's within himself, and through this light he will create a new community.

In a profound sense every man has two halves to his being; he is not one person so much as two persons trying to act in unison. I believe that in the heart of each human being there is something which I can only describe as a child of darkness who is equal and complementary to the more obvious child of light.

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.

Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril.

Man is never alone. Acknowledged or unacknowledged, that which dreams through him is always there to support him from within.

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.

Often I have found that the one thing that can save is the thing which appears most to threaten ... one has to go down into what one most fears and in that process ... comes a saving flicker of light and energy that, even if it does not produce the courage of a hero, at any rate enables a trembling mortal to take one step further.

On the night that the Second World war was declared, there were crowds in the street. It was a summer's night and there was a blackout. On every side you heard people crying: 'Look at the moon!' The moon had been there every minute of their lives and they'd never seen it.

Organized religion is making Christianity political rather than making politics Christian.

That is the trouble, everybody is giving everything in the world a piece of their minds. Whereas what we want is not a piece of somebody's mind, even the best mind, so much as an open heart and an open spirit.

The age of leaders has come and gone. You must be your own leader now. You must contain the spirit of our time in your own life and your own nature. You must really explore, as you've never explored before, what human nature is like.

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.

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.

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.

We have a mighty task before us. The earth needs our assistance.

It's the not-yet in the now, the taste of the fruit that does not-yet exist, hanging the blossom on the bough.

Modern man has lost the sense of wonder about the unknown and he treats it as an enemy.

Obviously he stood ready to speak for all. He was of course Karuso, and he began to bargain for the assembly with eloquence and great pertinacity. It was an affair that could not be hurried. The wage itself was a pretext, but the bargaining was important. Had I agreed immediately to the little money he demanded, all would have felt cheated and the poorer for it. The whole process was essentially a provision of wisdom and an affair of primitive honour that should not be minimized. It was a drama designed also to bring out the human factors to which Karuso was committing them all. I knew they would stop bargaining, not only when the wage seemed fair, but also when they felt they knew what kind of people we were.

The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two "hungers". There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning... There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning. There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you're happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong.