Often I have found that the one thing that can save is the thing which appears most to threaten … one has to go down into what one most fears and in that process … comes a saving flicker of light and energy that, even if it does not produce the courage of a hero, at any rate enables a trembling mortal to take one step further.
—Laurens van der Post
Topics: Fear, Anxiety
Creativity and love come from the same source.
—Laurens van der Post
Topics: Love, Creativity
Life begins as a quest of the child for the man and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child.
—Laurens van der Post
I remembered a story of how Bach was approached by a young admirer one day and asked, “But Papa Bach, how do you manage to think of all these new tunes?” “My dear fellow,” Bach is said to have answered, according to my version, “I have no need to think of them. I have the greatest difficulty not to step on them when I get out of bed in the morning and start moving around my room”.
—Laurens van der Post
Topics: Imagination
Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
—Laurens van der Post
Topics: Belief
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
Topics: Change
Man is never alone. Acknowledged or unacknowledged, that which dreams through him is always there to support him from within.
—Laurens van der Post
Topics: Self-Discovery
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
Topics: Light
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Stella Isaacs, Marchioness of Reading English Humanitarian
- John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn British Statesman
- Enoch Powell British Politician
- Benjamin Franklin American Founding Father, Inventor
- Edmund Burke British Philosopher, Statesman
- Che Guevara Argentine-Cuban Revolutionary
- Henry L. Stimson American Political leader
- Dante Alighieri Italian Poet, Philosopher
- Adolf Hitler German Fascist Dictator
- Mohandas K. Gandhi Indian Hindu Political leader
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