Quotes by South African Authors - Page 21

one can't see beauty until one see's life the way it is
Johnathan Carter
Start thinking for yourself, ask 'why?' and even venture to say 'why should I?' and pretty soon you will have half the world at your throat for being a 'trouble maker'.
Christina Engela
Ensuring that our home planet is healthy and life sustaining is an overwhelming priority that undercuts all other human activities. The ship must first float. Our failure to grasp these fundamental tenants of existence will be our undoing. And one thing is for certain. No calvary is going to come charging to our rescue. We are going to have to rescue ourselves or die trying. Workable solutions are urgently needed. Saving seals and tigers or fighting yet another oil pipeline through a wilderness area, while laudable, is merely shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. The real issue is our elementary accord with Earth and the plant and animal kingdoms has to be revitalized and re-understood.The burning question is, How?
Lawrence Anthony
High Performance Teams create cultures of caring, connection, commitment, collaboration and clear consistent communication
Tony Dovale
But when I am due…Keep local the chest to lay rest my simple skins in,
Mpho Leteng
If you don't follow Christ or love others in the way Christ said, and let yourself be bogged down instead with fearfulness, hatred, violence and the persecution of others - HOW can you call yourself a 'Christian'?
Christina Engela
When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, “Where are your wounds?” and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, “Was there nothing to fight for?” I couldn’t face that question.
Alan Paton
Yes, many years of oppression may have complicated things and it seems impossible for blacks to create their own means of production. But, I truly believe that we must start somewhere. We must reimagine a world where we are proudly black and support all things black in order to reinvent the economic wheel. We talk. We produce theories. We prove ourselves and and and... But we must also put our money where our mouths and theories are. This is why we fight each and every single day.
Malebo Sephodi
Do not risk your life for someone who does not care about you.
Gift Gugu Mona
Everybody is talking about the Law of Attraction. Nobody is talking about the Law of Action.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Religious extremism is fatal to those who don't conform to its values, or remold or submit themselves to its 'principles'. It craves control and power - and power is the one tool that enables it to wreak its characteristic havoc, destruction and cruelty upon those it chooses to label as scapegoats. Giving in to extremists enables them and empowers them - and worse, it encourages them.
Christina Engela
There will come a time when a person you most likely pushed out through your vagina and nursed from yournipples, whose bottom you wiped, and whose snot and spit you cleaned up over several sleep-starved years will apprehend you with a mixture of boredom and irritation and say, ‘Get a life, Mum.’This would be a good time to remember that a) violence never solved anything; b) teenagers don’t have a full brain yet – the prefrontal cortex that controls the ability to make important distinctions, like who controls the pocket money, only kicks in around the age of twenty-four; and c) you are, in fact, the adult.
Joanne Fedler
It is a remarkable feat to be able to see past the inhumanity of the behavior and recognize the humanity of the person committing the atrocious acts. This is not weakness. This is heroic strength, the noblest strength of the human spirit.
Desmond Tutu
The more excuses you make, the less progress you make!
Nicky Verd
It’s that I no longer know where I am. I seem to move around perfectly easily among people, to have perfectly normal relations with them. Is it possible, I ask myself, that all of them are participants in a crime of stupefying proportions? Am I fantasizing it all? I must be mad! Yet every day I see the evidences. The very people I suspect produce the evidence, exhibit it, offer it to me. Corpses. Fragments of corpses that they have bought for money.It is as if I were to visit friends, and to make some polite remark about the lamp in their living room, and they were to say, “Yes, it’s nice, isn’t it? Polish-Jewish skin it’s made of, we find that’s best, the skins of young Polish-Jewish virgins.” And then I go to the bathroom and the soap wrapper says, “Treblinka – 100% human stereate.” Am I dreaming, I say to myself? What kind of house is
J.M. Coetzee
To a man who was required to marry before he was allowed to have sex with his lover, marriage is a ‘righteous’ form of prostitution.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A first-rate story is easily killed by second-rate design.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To gain height, lose all your tall friends.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
You are heir to a heavenly fortune, the sole beneficiary of an infinite spiritual trust fund, a proverbial goldmine of sacred abundance beyond all common measure or human comprehension. But until you assert your rightful inheritance of this blessed gift, it will remain unclaimed and forever beyond your reach.
Anthon St. Maarten
Some people’s self-esteem was secretly improved when they discovered that their then-lovers had killed themselves over them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Always in life an idea starts small, it is only a sapling idea, but the vines will come and they will try to choke your idea so it cannot grow and it will die and you will never know you had a big idea, an idea so big it could have grown thirty meters through the dark canopy of leaves and touched the face of the sky.' He looked at me and continued. 'The vines are people who are afraid of originality, of new thinking. Most people you encounter will be vines; when you are a young plant they are very dangerous.' His piercing blue eyes looked into mine.' Always listen to yourself, Peekay. It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have learned something and you grow stronger. If you are right, you have taken another step toward a fulfilling life.
Bryce Courtenay
Every person is born for a reason, you really need to know yours.
Gugu Mona
Not being treated as equal IS oppression
Christina Engela
Let us thank God heartily as often as we pray that we have His Spirit in us to teach us to pray. Thanksgiving will draw our hearts out to God and keep us engaged with Him it will take our attention from ourselves and give the Spirit room in our hearts.
Andrew Murray
I can hear the tick tick tick in my head: A tripwire ready to explode in fury. And then, in my mind, I start to count down from ten…any moment now.
Danielle Esplin
In a Consciously Conscious Revolutionary Workplace, people are promoted based upon skillset, AND more importantly MINDSET
Tony Dovale
Your assignment will always be a forerunner to others’ assignments. Also, others’ assignments will always be forerunners to yours.
D.S Mashego
Civilization transformed man from a food gatherer to a gatherer of pieces of paper: diplomas, employment contracts, money, etc.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Voting on things is democratic, yes - but not on deciding on whether or not people should be equal or have human rights. That isn't democracy, it is mob rule.Everybody should be equal in a democracy - that is the nature of a democracy.
Christina Engela
There are not so many murders in this township, I think to myself, and not so few policemen, that a killing should be treated like an old woman who has lost her cat.
Jonny Steinberg
How do I negotiate my way across life with a system that I find so violent yet it seems so normal to many others?
Malebo Sephodi
Money is not respect. Neither is power. And if people respect you for your money or your power, it isn't you they respect - but the money or the power.When you win people over who hate you for what you are or what you believe, and they still come to you to make friends - or to ask you for counsel or assistance - that is respect - and that respect is power.
Christina Engela
Most of the very few people who would choose a good heart over riches would eventually use that to either make a lot of money, or attract men or women who are rich.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Here was a temporary solution. Parole would get Mofokeng and Mokoena out of jail as quickly as possible. Other details could be sorted out later. I accompanied Nyambi to Kroonstad jail at the end of October and remember that as he told Mofokeng and Mokoena the news—that they would be home for Christmas—smiles slowly but surely transformed the sombre, cautious expressions on their faces.Big problem: it was discovered in December, a full two months after the judgment was made, that the court order does not mention the NCCS at all. Consequently, the NCCS interpreted the court's order as having removed the NCCS's jurisdiction to deal with any "lifers" sentenced pre-1994. The members of the NCCS packed their briefcases and went home.No one knows why the judgment didn't mention the NCCS; maybe the judge who wrote it, Justice Bess Nkabinde, simply didn't know how the parole system operates; but eight of her fellow judges, the best in the land, found with her.The Mofokeng and Mokoena families, who are from 'the poorest of the poor', as the ANC likes to say, are distraught.But the rest—the law men, the politicians and the government ministers—well, quite frankly, they don't seem to give a fig. Zuma has gone on holiday, to host his famous annual Christmas party for children. Mapisa-Nqakula has also gone on holiday. Mofokeng and Mokoena remain where they were put 17 years ago, despite not having committed any crime.
Jeremy Gordin
88% of what we call good songs aren’t really good. They merely remind us of a good time we once had.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Strength is not determined by the looks but through action.
Gugu Mona
Storytellers are the keepers - we are the time keepers, the continuity keepers. We are the people who tell us who we are, where we've come from, and maybe even where we're going.
Bryce Courtenay
The only pressure I agree to, is my conscious and not peer pressure.
Unarine Ramaru
Expand!You are not small. Your Foremothers did not do what they did so you could occupy small!
Malebo Sephodi
She laughs, and that's really all he wanted.
Lauren Beukes
Humans seek connection above all else, and we are willing to destroy things to attain it.
Tarryn Fisher
Back then, work revolved around life. Today, life revolves around work.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Jonn Deire picked up eight yellowed and dog-eared cards from the pile, grumbling ‘garrn’ under his breath, while chewing on a frazzled looking toothpick. Skooch threw down a five of reds and said nothing. There was an impatient pause as the players waited for Beck to remember he had to play for Peeping William, who was still grumbling softly and rolling his eyes at intervals.
Christina Engela
To a man with an internet connection, every thought and every movement sounds like a tweet or status update.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Those who take their own lives, especially when the quality of those lives is much less bad than those of the cancer patient or the concentration camp prisoner, fly in the face of the normal will to live. They are seen as abnormal, not merely in the statistical sense of being unusual, but of being defective, either morally or psychologically.
David Benatar
Man is an extremely complex creature: he usually acts in an unselfish manner for selfish reasons.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In the Gospel story we find five great points of special importance; the birth, the life on earth, the death, the resurrection, and the ascension. In these we have what an old writer has called "the process of Jesus Christ;" the process by which He became what He is to-day--our glorified King, and our life. In all this life process we must be made like unto Him.
Andrew Murray
Listening has certainly become a scarce skill, therefore we need ways to enhance this skill especially for the next generation.
Gugu Mona
Past experience doesn't go away, so the secret is to accept, embrace and learn from it. However the key to the secret, is to keep it at bay and be open minded about the future from the second after the experience and never let the experience be the bar or commission of anything thereafter.
Unarine Ramaru
Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don't see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.
Antony Sher
The fact is, rape is utterly commonplace in all our cultures. It is part of the fabric of everyday life, yet we all act as if it’s something shocking and extraordinary whenever it hits the headlines. We remain silent, and so we condone it…Until rape, and the structures – sexism, inequality, tradition – that make it possible, are part of our dinner-table conversation with the next generation, it will continue. Is it polite and comfortable to talk about it? No. Must we anyway? Yes.”‘To protect our children, we must talk to them about rape
Desmond Tutu
I spoke of an Army on the point of entering an enemy's territories. Answering the question as to the cause of delay: 'Waiting for supplies.' The answer might also have been: 'Waiting for instructions, 'Waiting for orders.' If the last dispatch had not been received, with the final orders of the commander in chief, the army dared not move. Even so in the Christian life - as deep as the need of waiting for supplies is that of waiting for instructions.
Andrew Murray
Better things will follow you when you do good things to others.
Gift Gugu Mona
When you make the effort to speak someone else’s language, even if it’s just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, “I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being.
Trevor Noah
Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
My life doesn't bore me, because I know its worth. So when I let you be part of it, ensure you add value and not attempt to devalue it; or else you can never be part of my future.
Gift Gugu Mona
Technology has transformed the world into a global village. And communities, families, friends, etc., into local islands.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Distinctive facial features of a parent are poor people’s paternity test.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To go from Bitter to BETTER, means you need to turn your I onto an E, by embracing WE.
Tony Dovale
The simple law of the universe is that you create your own reality
Julian Pencilliah