While we are young the idea of death or failure is intolerable to us; even the possibility of ridicule we cannot bear.
It is difficult to restrain admirers of Shakespeare once they have begun to speak of him.
What is it which is bought dearly, offered for nothing, and then most often refused? – Experience, old people’s experience.
We invent the past and remember the future.
For really, dreaming is the well-mannered people’s way of committing suicide.
The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.
During the first quarter of the last century, seaside resorts became the fashion, even in those countries of Northern Europe within the minds of whose people the sea had hitherto held the role of the devil, the cold and voracious hereditary foe of humanity.
God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?
My love was both humble and audacious, like that of a page for his lady...
Some people have an unconquerable love of riddles. They may have the chance of listening to plain sense, or to such wisdom that explains life; but no, they must go and work their brains over a riddle, just because they do not understand what it means.
And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.
As we grow old we slowly come to believe that everything will turn out badly for us, and that failure is in the nature of things; but then we do not much mind what happens to us one way or the other.
Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.
There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain.
I do not think that I could ever really love a woman who had not, at one time or another, been up on a broomstick.
If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari once again.
In the Ngong Forest I have also seen, on a narrow path through thick growth, in the middle of a very hot day, the Giant Forest Hog, a rare person to meet.
I do not see eye to eye with the camera.
And I had by now become used to the idea of witchcraft, it seemed a reasonable thing, so many things are about, at night, in Africa.
Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse.