Laurens van der Post > Quotes

“Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.”
― 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

“Modern man has lost the sense of wonder
about the unknown and he treats it as
an enemy.”
― Laurens van der Post, Patterns of Renewal

“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, The Seed and the Sower

“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

“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, The Seed and the Sower

“Ninety percent of everything we know has been passed along through story.”
― 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

“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, Venture to the Interior

“[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living.”
― Sir 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, A Story Like the Wind

“Man is everywhere dangerously unaware of himself. We really know nothing about the nature of man, and unless we hurry to get to know ourselves we are in dangerous trouble.”
― Sir Laurens van der Post

“Had I not learnt lately that death is not something that happens at the end of our life? It is imprisonment in one moment of time, confinement in one sharp uncompromising deed or aspect or ourselves. Death is exclusion from renewal of our present-day selves.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“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 every 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

“But I had their instant, magnetic liking for my enemy and before I knew where, or even who I was, I had become prisoner of the effect I had on them. [...] I was shackled not so much to my good looks, as to what people, after seeing me, first imagined and then through their imaginations compelled me to be.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and The Sower

“[The official prosecutors] ... were more vengeful on behalf of our injuries than I myself could ever be.”
― Sir Laurens van der Post

“This feeling that Jung had that if man lived his life religiously, if he lived his life symbolically, then it was almost as if what the theologians called God and my Zulus called the first spirit, the first spirit had passed over some of his power and some of his responsibilities to the human being and that the human being had a God-like task to perform in creation. And the extent to which he performed it, he derived his meaning.”
― Laurens van der Post

“The depth of darkness into which you can descend, and still live, is an exact measure, I believe, of the height to which you can aspire to reach." Letter from Alan McGlashan to the Author”
― Laurens van der Post, The Night of the New Moon

“Wind and spirit, earth and being, rain and doing, lightning and awareness imperative, thunder and the word, seed and sower, all are one: and it is necessary only for man to ask for his seed to be chosen and to pray for the sower within to sow it through the deed and act of himself, and then the harvest for all will be golden and great.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“None of us, he claimed, were pure enough to claim a special solution for ourselves out of ‘our own human and time context’.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“And there is an extraordinarily angry and aggressive quality in the knowledge of modern man; he is angry with what he does not know; he hates and rejects it. He has lost the sense of wonder about the unknown and he treats it as an enemy.”
― Laurens van der Post, Patterns of Renewal

“What he meant by ‘awareness’ was perhaps a sense of the as yet unimagined wholeness of life; a recognition that one could live freely only on the frontiers of one’s being where the known was still contained in the infinite unknown, and where there could be a continual crossing and re-crossing of tentative borders, like lone hunters returning from perilous sojourns in great forests. It was, to put it pictorially, he said, a way of living not only by moonlight or sunlight, but also by starlight.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“In the spring,
Obeying the August spirits
I went to fight the enemy.
In the Fall,
Returning I beg the spirits,
To receive also the enemy.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Seed and the Sower

“Obviously he stood ready to speak for all.
He was of course Karuso, and he began to bargain for the assembly with eloquence and great pertinacity. It was an affair that could not be hurried. The wage itself was a pretext, but the bargaining was important. Had I agreed immediately to the little money he demanded, all would have felt cheated and the poorer for it. The whole process was essentially a provision of wisdom and an affair of primitive honour that should not be minimized. It was a drama designed also to bring out the human factors to which Karuso was committing them all. I knew they would stop bargaining, not only when the wage seemed fair, but also when they felt they knew what kind of people we were.”
― Laurens van der Post, The Lost World of the Kalahari