Jan Smuts Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

The intimate rapport with nature is one of the most precious things in life. Nature is indeed very close to us; sometimes closer than hands and feet, of which in truth she is but the extension. The emotional appeal of nature is tremendous, sometimes almost more than one can bear.

Jan Smuts
To me the greatest thing that has happened on this earth of ours is the rise of the human race to the vision of God. That story of the human rise to what I call the vision of God is the story which is told in the Bible.

Jan Smuts
Democracy, with its promise of international peace, has been no better guarantee against war than the old dynastic rule of kings.

Jan Smuts
Truth, beauty, goodness, and love are as much structures of the evolutionary universe as the sun and the earth and the moon.

Jan Smuts
This is a good world. We need not approve of all the items in it, nor of all the individuals in it; but the world itself-which is more than its parts or individuals; which has a soul, a spirit, a fundamental relation to each of us deeper than all other relations-is a friendly world.

Jan Smuts
Truth is a whole, and the truth of physics will be found to link on and to be but part of that larger truth which is the nature and the character of the universe.

Jan Smuts
According to quantum doctrine, the roots of life and mind lie embedded deep down in the ultimate structure of this universe, and they are not mere singular apparitions of an unaccountable character, arising accidentally in the later phases of evolution.

Jan Smuts
What was everybody's business in the end proved to be nobody's business. Each one looked to the other to take the lead, and the aggressorsgot away with it.

Jan Smuts
At the vital moment there seems to be a failure of leadership, and also a failure of the general human spirit among the peoples. I hope I am wrong, but I have a sense of impending calamity, a fear that the war was only the vanguard of calamity... I cannot look at that draft treaty without a sense of grief and shame.

Jan Smuts
The Mountain is not merely something eternally sublime. It has a great historical and spiritual meaning for us... From it came the Law, from it came the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. We may truly say that the highest religion is the Religion of the Mountain.

Jan Smuts
There is no doubt that mankind is once more on the move. The very foundations have been shaken and loosened, and things are again fluid. The tents have been struck, and the great caravan of humanity is once more on the march.
On the League of Nations

Jan Smuts
Having no human companion I felt a spirit of comradeship for the objects of nature around me. In my childish way I communed with these as with my own soul; they became the sharers of my confidence.

Jan Smuts
The groans of the dying and the blanched set faces of the dead... were enough to drive away all unwholesome feelings of exultation, and to remind one of the grim reality that war is. And even though these were the faces and the sufferings of our enemy, one had... a deeper sense of the common humanity which knows no racial distinctions.

Jan Smuts
If there was to be equal manhood suffrage the whites would be swamped all over South Africa by the blacks and the whole position for which whites have striven for 200 years or more would be given up.

Jan Smuts
I view it as a thoroughly bad peace – impolitic and impracticable in the case of Germany, absolutely ludicrous in the case of German Austria. Indeed I have not been able to read the comments of the Austrian delegates on our draft terms without deep emotion. I have fought this Peace from the inside with all my power, and have no doubt been able in the end to secure some small openings of hope for the future.

Jan Smuts
Some of you will not come back. Some of you will come back maimed. Those of you who do come back will come back changed men. That is war!

Jan Smuts
We do not want new orders. What the world wants is an old order of 2,000 years ago – the order of the man of Galilee.

Jan Smuts
In all the previous cases of wholes, we have nowhere been able to argue from the parts of the whole. Compared to its parts, the whole constituted by them is something quite different, something creatively new, as we have seen. Creative evolution synthesises from the parts a new entity not only different from them, but quite transcending them. That is the essence of a whole. It is always transcendent to its parts, and its character cannot be inferred from the characters of its parts.

Jan Smuts
I find our modern emphasis on 'rights' somewhat overdone and misleading... It makes people forget that the other and more important side of rights is duty. And indeed the great historic codes of our human advance emphasised duties and not rights... The Ten Commandments in the Old Testament and... the Sermon on the Mount... all are silent on rights, all lay stress on duties.

Jan Smuts
... the Jameson Raid was the real declaration of war.

Jan Smuts
History writes the word 'Reconciliation' over all her quarrels.

Jan Smuts
(Holism is) the tendency in nature to form wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts through creative evolution...

Jan Smuts