Nelson Mandela

I am not an optimist, but a great believer of hope.

I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances.

It always seems impossible until it is done.

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

It is what we make out of what we have, not what we are given, that separates one person from another.

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.

We seem but to linger in manhood to tell the dreams of our childhood, and they vanish out of memory ere we learn the language.

How earthy old people become moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

The men who have furnished me with my greatest inspiration have not been men of wealth, but men of deeds.

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

It is dangerous for mortal beauty, or terrestrial virtue, to be examined by too strong a light. The torch of Truth shows much that we cannot, and all that we would not, see.

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.

If a man is alive, there is always danger that he may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he runs.

Riding a horse is not a gentle hobby, to be picked up and laid down like a game of solitaire. It is a grand passion. It seizes a person whole and once it has done so, he/she will have to accept that his life will be radically changed.

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.

Love is only one of many passions.

Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?