Quotes from 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.

You cannot take the life of your times further than you have taken yourself.

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.

Creativity and love come from the same source.

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

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.

Of all man's inborn dispositions there is none more heroic than the love in him. Everything else accepts defeat and dies, but love will fight no-love every inch of the way.

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

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

Life begins as a quest of the child for the man and ends as a journey by the man to rediscover the child.

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.

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

We may not be able to stop and undo the hard old wrongs of the great world outside, but through you and me no evil shall come either in the unknown where you are going, or in this imperfect and haunted dimension of awareness through which I move.

Modern man has lost the sense of wonder about the unknown and he treats it as an enemy.

As the natural coherence of the world vanishes, there's a guilt that grows great and angry in the basement of our beings.

The only death the spirit recognizes is the denial of birth to that which strives to be born: those realities in ourselves that we have not allowed to live. The real ghost is a strange, persistent beggar at a narrow door asking to be born; asking, again and again, for admission at the gateway of our lives. Such ghosts I had, and thus, beyond all reason, I continued to be haunted.

Ninety percent of everything we know has been passed along through story.

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

a journey into the unknown in the world without produces a movement towards new and unknown areas in our world within.

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 every 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.

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.

This feeling that Jung had that if man lived his life religiously, if he lived his life symbolically, then it was almost as if what the theologians called God and my Zulus called the first spirit, the first spirit had passed over some of his power and some of his responsibilities to the human being and that the human being had a God-like task to perform in creation. And the extent to which he performed it, he derived his meaning.

And there is an extraordinarily angry and aggressive quality in the knowledge of modern man; he is angry with what he does not know; he hates and rejects it. He has lost the sense of wonder about the unknown and he treats it as an enemy.

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