19 Quotes by Laurens van der Post

But I had their instant, magnetic liking for my enemy and before I knew where, or even who I was, I had become prisoner of the effect I had on them. [...] I was shackled not so much to my good looks, as to what people, after seeing me, first imagined and then through their imaginations compelled me to be.

Modern man has lost the sense of wonderabout the unknown and he treats it asan enemy.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.