Alan Paton Quotes

Indeed, mother, you are always our helper."
"For what else are we born? ~ Alan Paton

I envision someday a great, peaceful South Africa in which the world will take pride, a nation in which each of many different groups will be making its own creative contribution. ~ Alan Paton

It is not permissible for us to go on destroying the family life when we know that we are destroying it. ~ Alan Paton

There are many sides to this difficult problem. And people persist in discussing soil-erosion, and tribal decay, and lack of schools, and crime, as though they were all parts of the matter. If you think long enough about it, you will be brought to consider republics, and bilingualism, and immigration, and Palestine, and God knows what. So in a way it is best not to think about it at all. ~ Alan Paton

They stopped at one of these half-tank houses ... where they were greeted by a young girl, who herself seemed like no more than a child.
- We have come to enquire after Absalom ... Have you heard nothing from him?
Nothing, she said.
When will he return? he asked.
I do not know, she said.
Will he ever return? he asked, indifferently, carelessly.
I do not know she said. She said it tonelessly, hopelessly, as one who is used to waiting, to desertion. She said it as one who expects nothing from her seventy years upon the earth. No rebellion will come out of her, no demands, no fierceness. Nothing will come out of her at all save the children of men who will use her, leave her, forget her. ~ Alan Paton

God forgives us ... who am I not to forgive? ~ Alan Paton

And what was there evil in their desires, in their hunger? That men should walk upright in the land where they were born, and be free to use the fruits of the earth, what was there evil in it? Yet men were afraid, with a fear that was deep, deep in the heart, a fear so deep that they hid their kindness, or brought it out with fierceness and anger, and hid it behind fierce and frowning eyes. They were afraid because they were so few. And such fear could not be cast out, but by love. ~ Alan Paton

The Afrikaner has nowhere to go, and thats why he would rather destroy himself than capitulate. ~ Alan Paton

Aye, but the hand that had murdered had once pressed the mother's breast into the thirsting mouth, had stolen into the father's hand when they went out into the dark. Aye, but the murderer afraid of death had once been a child afraid of the night. ~ Alan Paton

In the meantime the strike is over, with a remarkably low loss of life. All is quiet, they report, all is quiet.
In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools. ~ Alan Paton

It was not his habit to dwell on what could have been, but what could never be. ~ Alan Paton

There are voices crying what must be done, a hundred, a thousand voices. But what do they help if one seeks for counsel, for one cries this, and one cries that, and another cries something that is neither this nor that. ~ Alan Paton

The judge does not make the law. It is the people that make the law. It is the duty of a judge to do justice, but it is only the people that can be just ~ Alan Paton

I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find that we are turned to hating. ~ Alan Paton

For mines are for men, not for money. And money is not something to go mad about, and throw your hat into the air for. Money is for food and clothes and comfort, and a visit to the pictures. Money is to make happy the lives of children. Money is for security, and for dreams, and for hopes, and for purposes. Money is for buying the fruits of the earth, of the land where you were born. ~ Alan Paton

To give up the task of reforming society is to give up one's responsibility as a free man. ~ Alan Paton

It was to the small serious boy that he turned for his enjoyment. He had bought the child some cheap wooden blocks, and with these the little one played endlessly and intently, with a purpose obscure to the adult mind, but completely absorbing. ~ Alan Paton

It is not permissible to add to one's possesions if these things can only be done at the cost of other men. Such development has only one true name, and that is exploitation. ~ Alan Paton

Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey. But, sorrow is at least an arriving. ~ Alan Paton

It is my belief that the only power which can resist the power of fear is the power of love. ~ Alan Paton

There is a hard law. When an injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive. ~ Alan Paton

The humble man reached in his pocket for his sacred book, and began to read. It was this world alone that was certain. ~ Alan Paton

Because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie. ~ Alan Paton

Have you a room that you could let?"
"Yes, I have a room that I could let, but I do not want to let it. I have only two rooms, and there are six of us already, and the boys and girls are growing up. But school books cost money, and my husband is ailing, and when he is well it is only thirty-five shillings a week. And six shillings of that is for the rent, and three shillings of that is for the rent, and three shillings for travelling, and a shilling that we may all be buried decently, and a shilling for the books, and three shillings is for clothes and that is little enough, and a shilling for my husband's beer, and a shilling for his tobacco, and these I do not grudge for he is a decent man and does not gamble or spend his money on other women, and a shilling for the Church, and a shilling for sickness. And that leaves seventeen shillings for food for six, and we are always hungry. Yes I have a room but I do not want to let it. How much could you pay?"
"I could pay three shillings a week for the room."
"And I would not take it."
"Three shillings and sixpence."
"Three shillings and sixpence. You can't fill your stomach on privacy. You need privacy when your children are growing up, but you can't fill your stomach on it. Yes, I shall take three shillings and sixpence. ~ Alan Paton

The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions. ~ Alan Paton

One thing is about to be finished, but here is something that is only begun. And while I live it will continue ~ Alan Paton

All roads lead to Johannesburg. ~ Alan Paton

Therefore let us sell our labour for what it is worth. And if an industry cannot buy our labour, let that industry die. But let us not sell our labour cheap to keep an industry alive. ~ Alan Paton

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing. ~ Alan Paton

They were your friends?"
"Yes, they were my friends."
"And they will leave you to suffer alone?"
"Now I see it."
"And until this, were they friends you could trust?"
"I could trust them."
"I see what you mean. You mean they were the kind of friends that a good man could choose, upright, hard-working, obeying the law?
Tell me, were they such friends?
And now they leave you alone?
Did you not see it before?"
"I saw it. ~ Alan Paton

I see only one hope for our country, and that is when white men and black men, desiring neither power nor money, but desiring only the good for their country, come together to work for it.
I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating. ~ Alan Paton

But sorrow is better than fear. For fear impoverishes always, while sorrow may enrich. ~ Alan Paton

St. Francis of Assisi taught me that there is a wound in the Creation and that the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it. ~ Alan Paton

He says we are not forsaken. For while I wonder for what we live and struggle and die, for while I wonder what keeps us living and struggling, men are sent to minister to the blind ... Who gives, at this one hour, a friend to make darkness light before me? ~ Alan Paton

- Mr. Berg, Are you an Afrikaner?
- Yes
-And are you proud of it?
-I am not ashamed of it, but I am not proud of it, for in fact I had nothing to do with it. ~ Alan Paton

Have no doubt it is fear in the land. For what can men do when so many have grown lawless? Who can enjoy the lovely land, who can enjoy the seventy years, and the sun that pours down on the earth, when there is fear in the heart? Who can walk quietly in the shadow of the jacarandas, when their beauty is grown to danger? Who can lie peacefully abed, while the darkness holds some secret? What lovers can lie sweetly under the stars, when menace grows with the measure of their seclusion? ~ Alan Paton

-- They must go on, said Msimangu gravely. You cannot stop the world from going on. My friend, I am a Christian. It is not in my heart to hate a white man. It was a white man who brought my father out of darkness. But you will pardon me if I talk frankly to you. The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again. The white man has broken the tribe. And it is my belief -- and again I ask your pardon -- that it cannot be mended again. But the house that is broken, and the man that falls apart when the house is broken, these are the tragic things. That is why children break the law, and old white people are robbed and beaten.
He passed his hand across his brown.
-- It suited the white man to break the tribe, he continued gravely. But it has not suited him to build something in the place of what is broken. I have pondered this for many hours, and I must speak it, for it is the truth for me. They are not all so. There are some white men who give their lives to build up what is broken.
--But they are not enough, he said. They are afraid, this is the truth. It is fear that rules this land. ~ Alan Paton

Stand unshod upon it, for the ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed. ~ Alan Paton

Something deep is touched here, something that is good and deep. ~ Alan Paton

There is only one thing that has power completely, and that is love. ~ Alan Paton

The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just. ~ Alan Paton

I have always found that actively loving
saves one from a morbid preoccupation
with the shortcomings of society. ~ Alan Paton

He pondered long over this, for might not another man, returning to another valley, have found none of these things? Why was it given to one man to have his pain transmuted into gladness? Why was it given to one man to have such an awareness of God? ~ Alan Paton

And that next day, he was in the black mood, what we call the swartgalligheid, which is the black gall. And the heart is black too, and the world is black, and one can tell oneself that it will pass, but these are only words that one speaks to oneself, for while it is there it is no comfort that it will pass. ~ Alan Paton

For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing. ~ Alan Paton

Something in the humble voice must have touched Msimangu, for he said, I am not kind. I am a selfish and sinful man, but God put his hands on me, that is all. ~ Alan Paton

But when that dawn will come, of our emancipation, from the fear of bondage and the bondage of fear, why, that is a secret. ~ Alan Paton

Something within me is waking from long sleep, and I want to live and move again. Some zest is returning to me, some immense gratefulness for those who love me, some strong wish to love them also. I am full of thanks for life. I have not told myself to be thankful. I am just so. ~ Alan Paton

It was not his habit to dwell on what might have been but what could never be. ~ Alan Paton

One day in Johannesburg, and already the tribe was being rebuilt, the house and soul being restored. ~ Alan Paton

Deep down the fear of a man who lives in a world not made for him, whose own world is slipping away, dying, being destroyed, beyond any recall. ~ Alan Paton

He is a missionary and believes in God, intensely I mean, but it takes all kinds to make a world. ~ Alan Paton

When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house. ~ Alan Paton

We do not work for men. We work for the land and the people. We do not even work for money. ~ Alan Paton

The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again. ~ Alan Paton

Nothing is every quiet, except for fools. ~ Alan Paton

You ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right. ~ Alan Paton

When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven't any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for? I couldn't face that question. (Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful) ~ Alan Paton

There is no point in imagining that if one had been there, one could have prevented a thing that had happened only because it had not been prevented ~ Alan Paton

It is not "forgive and forget" as if nothing wrong had ever happened, but "forgive and go forward," building on the mistakes of the past and the energy generated by reconciliation to create a new future. ~ Alan Paton

There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man. ~ Alan Paton

Would age now swiftly overtake him? Would this terrible nodding last now for all his days, so that men said aloud in his presence, it is nothing, he is old and does nothing but forget? And would he nod as though he too were saying, Yes, it is nothing, I am old and do nothing but forget? But who would know that he said, I do nothing but remember? ~ Alan Paton

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it ... ~ Alan Paton

But there is only one thing that has power completely, and this is love. Because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power. ~ Alan Paton

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much. ~ Alan Paton

There is a man sleeping in the grass. And over him is gathering the greatest storm of all his days. Such lightening and thunder will come there has never been seen before, bringing death and destruction. People hurry home past him, to places safe from danger. And whether they do not see him there in the grass, or whether they fear to halt even a moment, but they do not wake him, they let him be. ~ Alan Paton

But perhaps when you were too obedient, and did not do openly what others did, and were quiet in church and hard-working at school, then some unknown rebellion brewed in you, doing harm to you, though how I do not understand. ~ Alan Paton

He went out of the door, and she watched him through the little window, walking slowly to the door of the church. Then she sat down at his table, and put her head on it, and was silent, with the patient suffering of black women, with the suffering of oxen, with the suffering of any that are mute. ~ Alan Paton

I have never thought that a Christian would be free of suffering, umfundisi. For our Lord suffered. And I come to believe that he suffered, not to save us from suffering, but to teach us how to bear suffering. For he knew that there is no life without suffering. ~ Alan Paton

What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? ~ Alan Paton

Let me not be afraid to defend the weak because of the anger of the strong, nor afraid to defend the poor because of the anger of the rich. ~ Alan Paton

It doesn't matter how "successful" each of us is in life. We're all doomed to die. Why can't anyone else see that? ~ Alan Moore

I never take anything for granted, and I never forget how lucky I have been, and am. ~ Alan Cumming

Behavioral economics tells us that people often focus too much on the wrong things, and tend to focus on aspects of the job that are salient. So, for example, the pay is salient, especially the starting pay. ~ Alan Krueger

Take care what words you speak that follow "I am." In so speaking you create your life. ~ Alan Cohen

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself. ~ Alan W. Watts

I have a motto: Work to become, not to acquire. ~ Alan Kulwicki

I was coming from a very cerebral, dark, difficult, layered play by Christopher Hampton and doing an action movie in Hollywood (Die Hard) with explosions, and I was holding a gun. ~ Alan Rickman

God, all those months of seeing Kelsey's pictures and hearing about her travels, and I had been raging with jealousy. And now it was my turn.
I wanted to mind the gap at the tube station and eat fish and chips and try to make the Queen's guards laugh. I wanted to see Big Ben and the Globe and the London Bridge and Dame Judi Dench. Or Maggie Smith. Or Alan Rickman. Or Sir Ian McKellen. Or anybody famous and British, really.
Holy crap. This was really happening.
And I wasn't just a tourist. I was visiting with someone who'd grown up in the city. With my fiancé.
Take that, world. ~ Cora Carmack

Time has to be given yet it is earned so you learn what matters and leave the rest to burn. ~ Tyler Alan Searles

The flag that was the symbol of slavery on the high seas for a long time was not the Confederate battle flag, it was sadly the Stars and Stripes. ~ Alan Keyes

I dont know whether you've ever looked into a miner's eyes for any length of time, that is. Because it is the loveliest blue you've ever seen. I think perhaps that's why I live in Ibiza, because the blue of the Mediterranean, you see, reminds me of the blue of the eyes of those Doncaster miners. ~ Alan Bennett

Science is an intellectual journey, and to me, it's not the destination, it's the journeyto get there. It's a way of thinking and it's an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know how the world works, and to know what the fundamental principles of the world are, and to know our place in it. I think once we stop asking questions like "what is the age of the universe," or "how are the instructions of DNA carried out on a microscopic level," once we stop asking questions like that, we're dead. ~ Alan Lightman

Everybody is I, you all know you are you. And wheresoever's beings exist throughout all galaxies it doesn't any difference. You are all of them, and when they come into being that's you coming into being, you know that very well. Only you don't have to remember the past in the same way you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland. You don't have to know how to shine the sun, you just do it, like you breathe. Doesn't it really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing, and that you're doing all of this and you never had any education on how to do it. ~ Alan Watts

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, and sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past effect in the future, but future and past are intertwined. ~ Alan Lightman

One day [Rabbi Spear] talked about his theory of happiness. He proposed that human feelings respond only to contrast and change, not to constancy, just as eyesight responds to contrasts of light and dark and to movement. The rabbi speculated that if emotions are similar to eyesight and other senses, then perhaps emotions were developed by nature as a survival mechanism. ~ Alan Lightman

The yin-yang view of the world is serenely cyclic. Fortune and misfortune, life and death, whether on small scale or vast, come and go everlastingly without beginning or end, and the whole system is protected from monotony by the fact that, in just the same way, remembering alternates with forgetting. ~ Alan W. Watts

At Shimer we paid no attention to disciplinary boundaries; we blithely followed problems wherever they led. For better or for worse, I've never been able to shake this approach. ~ Alan Dowty

In my opinion, it's a highly over-rated phenomenon. Mars gets along perfectly without so much as a micro-organism. See: There's the South Pole beneath us now. . . No life. No life at all, but giant steps, ninety feet high, scoured by dust and wind into a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting around the pole in ripples ten thousand years wide. Tell me. . . would it be greatly improved by an oil pipeline? ~ Alan Moore

It was a lie and I detected it at once. As an accomplished fibber myself, I spotted the telltale signs of an untruth before they were halfway out of his mouth: the excessive detail, the offhand delivery, and the wrapping-up of it all in casual chitchat. ~ Alan Bradley

Perspective is worth 80 IQ points. ~ Alan Kay

Jesus was not the man he was as a result of making Jesus Christ his personal savior. ~ Alan W. Watts

Captain Phasma. Remember me?" He moved his weapon slightly. "Here's my blaster, ya still wanna inspect it?" Phasma held on to her dignity. "Yes, I remember you. FN-2187." Finn shook his head curtly. "Not anymore. My name is Finn. A real name for a real person. And I'm in charge now. ~ Alan Dean Foster

The brutalization of humans by other humans never fails to get to me in some angry-making way. It shot up in me like an explosion. ~ Alan Furst

The end result is people like you, having no real understanding of the Bewitchers' true nature and purpose. ~ Trevor Alan Foris

I did a Broadway show with Alan Alda and how much money can Alan Alda have. ~ Alice Barrett

No matter what you do or where you are, you're going to be missing out on something. ~ Alan Arkin

Right, so I wake up in the morgue as me, Grace, but I'm eighteen again and I'm like wow! ~ Trevor Alan Foris

As an artist in the 1960s, Norman Sunshine was able to maintain a moderately out lifestyle. But when the first exhibition of his paintings in New York brought on a profile in The New York Times in 1968, he was photographed in the apartment that he admitted sharing with Shayne. At both his advertising agency and Shayne's television production company, the article was met with absolute silence. ~ Alan Shayne

I write about it in the book and, you know, explain that. But that was the technicality that actually got my sentence reduced - that Alan Dershowitz used to have my sentence - it came down eventually to eight years. ~ Jim Bakker