Alan Paton Quotes

“The Judge does not make the law. It is people that make the law. Therefore if a law is unjust, and if the Judge judges according to the law, that is justice, even if it is not just.”

“For it is the dawn that has come, as it has come for a thousand centuries, never failing.”

“I have always found that actively loving
saves one from a morbid preoccupation
with the shortcomings of society.”

“Pain and suffering, they are a secret. Kindness and love, they are a secret. But I have learned that kindness and love can pay for pain and suffering.”

“There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.”

“The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again.”

“I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.”

“There is a hard law. When an injury is done to us, we never recover until we forgive.”

“The truth is, our civilization is not Christian; it is a tragic compound of great ideal and fearful practice, of loving charity and fearful clutching of possessions.”

“Happy the eyes that can close”

“because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie.”

“We had two masters of the spoken word in South Africa, General Smuts and his lieutenant J. H. Hofmeyr, whose life I wrote. Smuts spoke in a high-pitched voice, not the kind of voice that one would expect from a famous soldier, but he too could hold an audience in the hollow of his hand, partly because he was Smuts, partly because he could say nothing trite or shallow, partly because he knew how to speak to ordinary men and women.”