Quotes by South African Authors - Page 40

Captain Harald Biscay rubbed his graying temples, staring deep in thought at the vast star field showing on the large navigation display on the bridge. It had been a pretty rough few days for him. Of all the things he’d seen in his travels through the universe, not many rated worthy of being remembered. Of the few examples of items Captain Biscay rated that highly, when he was a young man, his uncle would often play the bagpipes at strange hours of the night – shortly before being put in a ‘home’. That rated a mention.
Christina Engela
Always listen to yourself... It is better to be wrong than simply to follow convention.
Bryce Courtenay
If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner. -Nelson Mandela, activist, South African president, Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1918)
Nelson Mandela
I saw the figure of 178 Billion wasted/stolen from the people of a country by its corrupt and inept government. Such a figure could truly transform the entire country; education, health, roads, schooling, entrepreneurial environment... of millions of people, rather than be secreted away as a few more 0000's in global bank accounts for the greeders.We need to Rethink Public Service, Values, Ethics and Leadership.
Tony Dovale
There is nothing ridiculous in love.
Olive Schreiner
Right now I may not have it all, but I know my future is bright because as long as I live there is hope for my situation.
Gift Gugu Mona
You can pass any law you like to make 'criminals' of those you don't like and then justify it with whatever stupid reasoning that appeals to you. Is that rule of law - or tyranny?
Christina Engela
I don’t know what more to say... I did not follow up in the days to come. I did not, I did, I should, I could... Just like that, I let that entire ordeal go.
Phindiwe Nkosi
We have glorified wealth and freedom so much that it is impossible for most of us to truly believe that a man can truly be happy in a shack or within the confines of a prison cell.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
If love wasn't conditional, everybody would be in love with everybody.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
[Mandela] subsequently used words that never left me: 'Because you hold a particular position, doesn't mean that you are more important that anyone else. Your time is not more valuable that anybody else's time. If you are late you show that you have no respect for another person's time and therefore no respect for other people because you consider yourself to be more important.
Zelda la Grange
So rich a client having suffered such a messy death was an unsettling embarrassment to Captain Harald Biscay. It was bad for business. He had the murder hushed up immediately, his security staff investigating the matter covertly but thoroughly. Five and a half thousand souls onboard. Five and a half thousand suspects. Three days. So far, nothing. Now it would be taken further by the planetary authorities on the colony world below. A forensic team (cunningly disguised as a cleaning crew) was now rummaging through Smiffs apartment, examining every single particle. He had a feeling -- a strong feeling, about what they were going to find. Somehow, Biscay was of the opinion that this was going to be another contender for the Unsolved Murders show.
Christina Engela
Love songs are nothing without exaggeration.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
I choose to say it is well even when it is not, because in every situation I find myself in, I still learn from it.
Gift Gugu Mona
Knowledge is a dangerous thing. But ignorance is no protection.
Masha du Toit
The moment you hand over YOUR responsibility to manage your own rights, morality, and freedoms - to the government, that is the moment democracy fails.
Christina Engela
Public opinion is to an unconventional idea … what abortion is to sperm.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A poor but confident man is as hard to find as a rich but shy man.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Once human beings had developed higher-order consciousness, they had the ability to see mental images projected onto surfaces and to experience afterimages.
James David Lewis-Williams
To Donald Trump, making America great means making the people great. To the political cast, conversely, making America great means making government great.
Ilana Mercer
In a minute, in an hour, it will be too late; whatever is happening to her will be set in stone, will belong to the past. But now is not too late. Now he must do something
J.M. Coetzee
A maid’s yard, house, wardrobe, fridge, etc. sometimes also serve as her master’s dustbin or dumpsite.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Irony: When those who call others a 'threat to Christianity' reject the crucial tenets of their own faith themselves.
Christina Engela
As useful as an unhappy artist. As useless as a happy philosopher.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
When you strive for excellence in leadership, then you will excel as a leader.
Gift Gugu Mona
He who makes $25,000 annually through passive income is more enviable than he who earns $100,000 annually through a salary.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
It's disheartening that most Christians will still miss Heaven because Christians today have forgotten that Heaven is meant for those who declare Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, then confirm that declaration with action
Gift Gugu Mona
Most adults are knowledgeable to a child, but ignorant for their age.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We now live in a world where murderers and terrorists can cause death and mayhem, and when the time is "right" for them, they convert to normal human values, and become a global icon and saint!
Tony Dovale
You shouldn't have to convince anyone to choose you. There is no real choice in love.
Tarryn Fisher
I am shedding.I am not a new me.I am my old me in my new me.I remain, carved with the soul of my knife.My mess scattered all over my countenance. I am me. Take me as I am.
Malebo Sephodi
You can never escape God's Grace because as you run from it, you run to it.
Gift Gugu Mona
The beauty of being alive is that each day you are given another chance to correct what you did wrong and improve on what you can do right.
Gift Gugu Mona
The political Greeders mindset wastes resources that could transform the future of tens of millions of people and the destinies of the countries.We need to rethink Leadership and politics.
Tony Dovale
It was masturbation, not willpower, that made it possible for gazillions of women to walk down the aisle with their reputation and their hymen still intact.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Humans are intelligent and resourceful. If we've been around a million or more years, why are we so disinclined to believe that we could have built cities 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 or even more years ago?
Christina Engela
The famous split windowSplits had the KDF dash until 1953, which had two glove compartments. Note rear “w” bonnet and small round taillights. There were no indicators like today’s cars – just pop-up indicators that work with an electric servo, called ‘trafficators’ or ‘semaphores’. 6v electrics. Small, flat front windscreen.
Christina Engela
Sniffing glue is a homeless nonbeliever's prayer.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A paedophile is someone whose sexual attraction towards children their own age did not grow with them.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.
Desmond Tutu
Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence.
J.M. Coetzee
Inspiration shouldn't respond to time, rather the other way around. Time must be altered to inspiration, "Timing is wrong" NO! Timing is never wrong. Sacrifice and the likes gets thrown in at this point.
Unarine Ramaru
It is not the case that one can create new people on the assumption that if they are not pleased to have come into existence they can simply kill themselves. Once somebody has come into existence and attachments with that person have been formed, suicide can cause the kind of pain that makes the pain of childlessness mild by comparison. Somebody contemplating suicide knows (or should know) this. This places an important obstacle in the way of suicide. One’s life may be bad, but one must consider what affect ending it would have on one’s family and friends. There will be times when life has become so bad that it is unreasonable for the interests of the loved ones in having the person alive to outweigh that person’s interests in ceasing to exist. When this is true will depend in part on particular features of the person for whom continued life is a burden. Different people are able to bear different magnitudes of burden. It may even be indecent for family members to expect that person to continue living. On other occasions one’s life may be bad but not so bad as to warrant killing oneself and thereby making the lives of one’s family and friends still much worse than they already are.
David Benatar
These mods made significant improvements to the cars – enough so that I changed my mind (another procedure altogether) every time I thought of selling the damn thing and buying a Toyota. I hope you benefit from this and preserve your ailing finances!Good luck!
Christina Engela
You have to make peace with the fact that you have the right to be here, not because you have what it takes, but because your existence was authorised by the heavens.
D.S Mashego
We need to consciously remember that we have more responsibility to protect our planet, because without it we have nowhere else to live.
Gugu Mona
We can look at our tattoos from cancer treatment as awful reminders of a ghastly time in our lives, or we can use them as reminders of what God brought us through.
Shirley Corder
Many of the boys and men who are regarded as immature by some females are so deemed merely because they do not want to get married someday … or soon.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Rethink success: Few people will ever discover that the most important business they will ever run.. is their life!
Tony Dovale
Do not distance yourself from the people who need you most today, because tomorrow you will need them the most.
Gift Gugu Mona
Employees go to school for 12 – 18 years merely to impress prospect employers in a 12 – 18 minutes interview.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The house you built can cave you in if you didn't do it right.
Unarine Ramaru
But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.
Trevor Noah
I don't need a man to be happy.
Monique Snyman
Rhythm, repetition, making patterns--these are not only important devices for shaping the strange and abstract instrument/object we call a poem or a story, but they are craved as well because of our primordial need for reassurance, the sense of security we get from moving over the known. A mystery doesn't lose power in revisiting. Writing is not just to know, it is also to console. We need to be reminded that we are part of the obscure rhythm of birth and decade. It is the humming that matters.
Breyten Breytenbach
The Imperial Senate, ever conscious of the weight of public opinion resting on the tip of the pencil come voting day, wanted to be fair and just – or at least appear that way. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there was little love lost between Imperial troops and the locals who viewed each other with little short of open hostility, and often through the sighting devices attached to weaponry of various diverse descriptions.
Christina Engela
With the right MINDSET, you can Survive, Thrive & Grow... Even in the Midst of turbulence and change
Tony Dovale
Anger and animosity cannot enshrine what was once wonderful...
Mala Naidoo
Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe.In South Africa, no one doubts that Wednesday's elections will be free and fair. While there is an unacceptable degree of government corruption, there is no evidence of the wholesale kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe's elite. While there has been the abuse of the organs of state by the ruling ANC, there is not the state terror of Mugabe's Zanu-PF. And while there is a clear left bias to Zuma's ANC, there is no suggestion of the kind of voluntarist experimentation that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees.
Mark Gevisser
There is no law against delaying action to weigh it in thought.
Unarine Ramaru