Esther Mahlangu Quotes

In man (as the only rational creature on earth) those natural capacities which are directed to the use of his reason are to be fully developed only in the race, not in the individual.

Before adolescence, memory is more interested in the future than the past...

I believe that the abolition of private ownership of land and capital is a necessary step toward any world in which the nations are to live at peace with one another.

?It’ pretty hard for the Lord to guide you if you haven’t made up your mind which way to go.”

The opposite of work is idleness. But very few of us know what to do with idleness. When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, we have very little time. And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health.

Criticism alone can sever the root of materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, fanaticism, and superstition, which can be injurious universally; as well as of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous chiefly to the Schools, and hardly allow of being handed on to the public.

I am what I am: an individual, unique and different, with a lineal history of an ancestral promptings and urgings, a history of dreams, desires, and of special experiences, of all of which I am the sum total.

I shall never be able to have any more of these boyish, zestful affairs — which are, really, when one thinks about it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly.

If it does not grow, even though you are working hard, it is not because of unfavorable circumstances, bad timing, or bad luck. ... of the past has shown, it is during the bad times that the skilled manager lays firm foundations for future growth.

Su Tungp'o said: "Life is like a spring dream which vanishes without a trace." I should be ungrateful to the gods if I did not try to put my life down on record.

I am not ashamed of my past and don't intend to be ashamed of it.

I had a very pleasant evening, however, though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.

My wife gave birth to a baby girl soon after the Olympics and I named her 'Fatuma' after you.

In each separate thing that you do consider the matters which come first, and those which follow after, and only then approach the thing itself.

[I]n a free society each individual has a responsibility towards the beliefs of his society—a responsibility on which all the rights and duties of citizenship are founded.

A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything. (p. 44)