Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
there are many Africas.
Success feeds confidence.
Success breeds confidence.
I have a trunk containing continents.
Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?
That's what makes death so hard--unsatisfied curiosity
The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.
There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.
After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work
No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work.
The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all.
There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing
Memory is a drug. Memory can hold you against your strength and against your will.
Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead.
Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.
the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.
You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.
In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.
all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.
A lovely horse is always an experience.... It is an emotional experience of the kind that is spoiled by words.
A map says to you. Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not... I am the earth in the palm of your hand.
I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.
A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.
If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.
If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.
Conformation ... but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere - in men, in horses, and in women.
Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice
[The lion] began to contemplate me with a kind of quiet premeditation, like that of a slow-witted man fondling an unaccustomed thought.
In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favors that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned.
Roots of the weed sucked first life from the genesis of earth and hold the essence of it still. Always the weed returns; the cultured plant retreats before it.
Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips.
But, for a little while, this is the place for us -- a good place too--a place of good omen, a place of beginning things--and of ending things I never thought would end.
One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day that will be an airborne life.
A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.
There's an old adage," he said, "translated from the ancient Coptic, that contains all the wisdom of the ages -- "Life is life and fun is fun, but it's all so quiet when the goldfish die.
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are burried deep-leave it anyway except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can.
Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.
I have lifted my plane . . . for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the Earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of first-born adventure.
The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening.
For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. it demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.
What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and color and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack.
In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires - rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.
A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again, wherever he is, or wherever he hoped to be.
No human pursuit achieves dignity unless it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things - the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold - were false to you.
Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.
It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.
Harmony comes gradually to a pilot and his plane. The wing does not want so much to fly true as to tug at the hands that guide it; the ship would rather hunt the wind than lay her nose to the horizon far ahead. She has a derelict quality in her character; she toys with freedom and hints at liberation, but yields her own desires gently.
But the soul of Africa, its integrity, the slow inexorable pulse of its life, is its own and of such singular rhythm that no outsider, unless steeped from childhood in its endless, even beat, can ever hope to experience it, except only as a bystander might experience a Masai war dance knowing nothing of its music nor the meaning of its steps.
I suppose if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.
I look at my yesterdays for months past, and find them as good a lot of yesterdays as anybody might want. I sit there in the firelight and see them all. The hours that made them were good, and so were the moments that made the hours. I have had responsibilities and work, dangers and pleasure, good friends, and a world without walls to live in.