Laurens van der Post Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

The man of the Kalahari is Esau and we are Jacob, and there is a great gulf between us. This sense of property, of possession that we have is utterly foreign to the Esaus of the world. We have, he is.

Laurens van der Post
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.

Laurens van der Post
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.

Laurens van der Post
Thinking has its place... but, only when one is confronted with known facts and statistics. When you're in the unknown and the dark... you surrender your thinking in trust to the feelings that come to you out of the bush.

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

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

Laurens van der Post
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.

Laurens van der Post
We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place.

Laurens van der Post
I don't think a man who has watched the sun going down could walk away and commit a murder.

Laurens van der Post
What is most threatening and destructive in human society today is the human being who is split in his own nucleus: it is the fission in the modern soul which makes nuclear fission so dangerous – he is a split atom. He has got to heal himself, make himself whole.

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

Laurens van der Post
Somehow we should learn to know that our problems are our most precious possessions. They are the raw materials of our salvation: no problem, no redemption.

Laurens van der Post
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.

Laurens van der Post
You may well be right, and disaster may well come, I had told him. But for me it will always be a point of honour to go on working to prevent disaster, if only to make certain it is the right kind of disaster life needs when it does ultimately come.

Laurens van der Post
Africa has always walked in my mind proudly upright, an African giant among the other continents, toes well dug into the final ocean of one hemisphere, rising to its full height in the graying skies of the other; head and shoulders broad, square and enduring, making light of the bagful of blue Mediterranean slung over its back as it marches patiently through time.

Laurens van der Post