Laurens van der Post famous quotes

03-28-2025

Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
-- Laurens van der Post

#Freedom #Doubt #Frightening
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

#Commitment #Leader #Age
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

#Children #Believe #Heart
We have a mighty task before us. The earth needs our assistance.
-- Laurens van der Post

#Climate #Tasks #Needs
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

#Men #Light #People
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

#Hero #Light #Energy
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

#Knowing #Individuality #Way
Organized religion is making Christianity political rather than making politics Christian.
-- Laurens van der Post

#Christian #Political #Organized
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

#Two #Connections #Mystery
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

#Children #Dark #Parent
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

#Love #Fighting #Men
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

#Change #Journey #Trying
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

#Hero #Men #Stories
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

#Summer #War #Moon
Man is never alone. Acknowledged or unacknowledged, that which dreams through him is always there to support him from within.
-- Laurens van der Post

#Dream #Men #Self
Creativity and love come from the same source.
-- Laurens van der Post

#Creativity #And Love #Source

You may also like:

Alan Paton
Author
Bruno Bettelheim
Psychologist
Carl Jung
Psychiatrist
Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Poet
James Hillman
Psychologist
John Frankenheimer
Film director
Joseph Campbell
Writer
Lytton Strachey
Writer
Marie-Louise von Franz
Psychologist
Marion Woodman
Author
Matthew Modine
Film actor
Nagisa Oshima
Film director
Olive Schreiner
Author
Robert Bly
Poet
Stephen Spender
Poet
Tom Conti
Actor
Tom Courtenay
Actor
William Plomer
Author
Wolfgang Pauli
Physicist
Jeremy Griffith
Author