Laurens Van Der Post Quotes & Sayings

I suspect it was ... the old story of the implacable necessity of a man having honour within his own natural spirit. A man cannot live and temper his mettle without such honour. There is deep in him a sense of the heroic quest; and our modern way of life, with its emphasis on security, its distrust of the unknown and its elevation of abstract collective values has repressed the heroic impulse to a degree that may produce the most dangerous consequences. — Laurens Van Der Post

The mystery of creation was always between two, in an awareness that there was always both a 'thou'and and 'I'. — Laurens Van Der Post

Modern man has lost the sense of wonder
about the unknown and he treats it as
an enemy. — Laurens Van Der Post

Creativity and love come from the same source. — Laurens Van Der Post

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right. — Laurens Van Der Post

...a journey into the unknown in the world without produces a movement towards new and unknown areas in our world within. — Laurens Van Der Post

Ninety percent of everything we know has been passed along through story. — Laurens Van Der Post

You may well be right, and disaster may well come, I had told him. But for me it will always be a point of honour to go on working to prevent disaster, if only to make certain it is the right kind of disaster life needs when it does ultimately come. — Laurens Van Der Post

Organized religion is making Christianity political rather than making politics Christian. — Laurens Van Der Post

The spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird. — Laurens Van Der Post

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

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. — Laurens Van Der Post

That is the trouble, everybody is giving everything in the world a piece of their minds. Whereas what we want is not a piece of somebody's mind, even the best mind, so much as an open heart and an open spirit. — Laurens Van Der Post

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. — Laurens Van Der Post

You cannot take the life of your times further than you have taken yourself. — Laurens Van Der Post

On the night that the Second World war was declared, there were crowds in the street. It was a summer's night and there was a blackout. On every side you heard people crying: 'Look at the moon!' The moon had been there every minute of their lives and they'd never seen it. — Laurens Van Der Post

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. — Laurens Van Der Post

I hear people everywhere saying that the trouble with our time is that we have no great leaders any more. If we look back we always had them. But to me it seems there is a very profound reason why there are no great leaders any more. It is because they are no longer needed. The message is clear. You no longer want to be led from the outside. Every man must be his own leader. He now knows enough not to follow other people. He must follow the light that's within himself, and through this light he will create a new community. — Laurens Van Der Post

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

Of all of men's inborn dispositions there is none more heroic than love. Love will fight no-love every inch of the way. — Laurens Van Der Post

The age of leaders has come and gone. You must be your own leader now. You must contain the spirit of our time in your own life and your own nature. You must really explore, as you've never explored before, what human nature is like. — Laurens Van Der Post

No imagination has yet been great enough to invent improvements to the truth. Truth, however terrible, carried within itself its own strange comfort for the misery it is so often compelled to inflict on behalf of life. Sooner or later it is not pretence but the truth which gives back with both hands what it has taken away with one. Indeed, unaided and alone it will pick up the fragments of the reality it has shattered and piece them together again in the shape of more immediate meaning than the one in which they had been previously contained. — Laurens Van Der Post

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

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

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

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

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. — Laurens Van Der Post

We have a mighty task before us. The earth needs our assistance. — Laurens Van Der Post

The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two "hungers". There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning ...
There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.
There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you're happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong. — Laurens Van Der Post