Jan Smuts famous quotes

03-28-2025

When in doubt, do the courageous thing.
-- Jan Smuts

#Courage #Doubt #Courageous
The mountain is not something eternally sublime; it has a great historic and spiritual meaning to us. It stands for us as the ladder of life. Nay, more; it is the ladder of the soul and in a curious way the source of religion. From it came the Law, from it came the Gospel in the Sermon of the Mount. We may trul say that the highest religion is the Religion of the Mountain.
-- Jan Smuts

#Spiritual #Law #Soul
A man is not defeated by his opponents but by himself
-- Jan Smuts

#Confidence #Men #Opponents
Democracy, with its promise of international peace, has been no better guarantee against war than the old dynastic rule of kings.
-- Jan Smuts

#Kings #War #Promise
Having no human companion I felt a spirit of comradeship for the objects of nature around me. In my childish way I communed with these as with my own soul; they became the sharers of my confidence.
-- Jan Smuts

#Soul #Way #Spirit
...evolution is the gradual development and stratification of progressive series of wholes, stretching from the inorganic beginnings to the highest level of spiritual creation.
-- Jan Smuts

#Spiritual #Growth #Development
If there was to be equal manhood suffrage the whites would be swamped all over South Africa by the blacks and the whole position for which whites have striven for 200 years or more would be given up.
-- Jan Smuts

#Years #Would Be #Given
This is a good world. We need not approve of all the items in it, nor of all the individuals in it; but the world itself-which is more than its parts or individuals; which has a soul, a spirit, a fundamental relation to each of us deeper than all other relations-is a friendly world.
-- Jan Smuts

#Soul #Friendly #Needs
Perhaps it is God's will to lead the people of South Africa through defeat and humiliation to a better future and a brighter day.
-- Jan Smuts

#People #Defeat #Brighter Days
The intimate rapport with nature is one of the most precious things in life. Nature is indeed very close to us; sometimes closer than hands and feet, of which in truth she is but the extension. The emotional appeal of nature is tremendous, sometimes almost more than one can bear.
-- Jan Smuts

#Emotional #Hands #Things In Life
History writes the word 'Reconciliation' over all her quarrels.
-- Jan Smuts

#Writing #Quarrels #Reconciliation
When I look at history, I am a pessimist...but when I look at prehistory, I am an optimist.
-- Jan Smuts

#Looks #Pessimist #Prehistory
Instead of the animistic, mechanistic, or the mathematical universe, we see the genetic, organic, holistic universe.
-- Jan Smuts

#Mathematical #Holistic #Universe
What was everybody's business in the end proved to be nobody's business. Each one looked to the other to take the lead, and the aggressorsgot away with it.
-- Jan Smuts

#Ends
In spite of the great advances which have been made in our knowledge, some fundamental gaps remain. Matter, life and mind still remain utter disparate phenomena, yet the concepts of all three arise in experience; and in the human all three meet and intermingle.
-- Jan Smuts

#Mind #Three #Fundamentals
If a nation does not want a monarchy, change the nation's mind. If a nation does not need a monarchy, change the nation's needs.
-- Jan Smuts

#Mind #Doe #Needs
To me the greatest thing that has happened on this earth of ours is the rise of the human race to the vision of God. That story of the human rise to what I call the vision of God is the story which is told in the Bible.
-- Jan Smuts

#Bible #Race #Vision

You may also like:

Bram Fischer
Lawyer
Carroll Quigley
Historian
Cecil Rhodes
Businessman
David Livingstone
Missionary
David Lloyd George
Chancellor of the Exchequer
Frederik Willem de Klerk
Former State President of South Africa
Georges Clemenceau
French Statesman
Hendrik Verwoerd
Political leader
Henry Morton Stanley
Journalist
Ludwig von Bertalanffy
Neville Chamberlain
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Oliver Tambo
South African Politician
Otto von Bismarck
Statesman
P. W. Botha
Former Prime Minister of South Africa
Prince Philip
Royal Knight of the Garter
Ramsay MacDonald
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Rudyard Kipling
Writer
Stanley Baldwin
Former Chancellor of the Exchequer
Winston Churchill
Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Woodrow Wilson
28th U.S. President