Leave the rest to the gods.
Make a good use of the present.
The avarice person is ever in want; let your desired aim have a fixed limit.
Your own safety is at stake when your neighbor’s house is in flames.
Fierce eagles do not produce timorous doves.
It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar – that I call an achievement.
The poets aim is either to profit or to please, or to blend in one the delightful and the useful. Whatever the lesson you would convey, be brief, that your hearers may catch quickly what is said and faithfully retain it. Every superfluous word is spilled from the too-full memory.
We need the tonic of wildness…At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
While fools shun one set of faults they run into the opposite one.
Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s unbelievable.
The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
An awareness of our past is essential to the establishment of our personality and our identity as Africans.
Being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.
This gives force to the strong — that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.
As long as our civilization is essentially one of property, of fences, of exclusiveness, it will be mocked by delusions. Our riches will leave us sick; there will be bitterness in our laughter; and our wine will burn our mouth. Only that good profits, which we can taste with all doors open, and which serves all men.
To have striven, to have made the effort, to have been true to certain ideals – this alone is worth the struggle.
Opportunity makes a thief.
Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt.
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
It matters not how a man dies, but how he lives. The act of dying is not of importance, it lasts so short a time.
Praise, like gold and diamonds, owes its value only to its scarcity.
