Laurens van der Post

We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place.

Sir Laurens Jan van der Post, CBE (13 December 1906 – 15 December 1996) was a South African Afrikaner writer, farmer, soldier, educator, journalist, humanitarian, philosopher, explorer and conservationist.

Quotes

Africa has always walked in my mind proudly upright, an African giant among the other continents.

• 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." Whether we know it or not we all have within us a natural instinctive man, a dark brother, to whom we are irrevocably joined as to our own shadow. However much our conscious reason may reject him, he is there for good or ill, clamouring for recognition and awareness and a fair share of life just as the less conscious black man of Africa is struggling and clamouring for life, light and honour in our societies. I need not emphasize how the rational, calculating, acutely reasoning and determined human being that Western man has made of himself has increasingly considered this side of himself not as a brother but as an enemy, capable, with his upsurges of rich emotion and colourful impulses, of wrecking conscious man's carefully planned and closely reasoned way of existence.
  • The Dark Eye in Africa (New York: William Morrow & Co, 1955) pt. 1

• We suffer from a hubris of the mind. We have abolished superstition of the heart only to install a superstition of the intellect in its place.
  • The Heart of the Hunter (New York: William Morrow and Co, 1961) pt. 2, ch. 10

• Men are never alone because that which, acknowledged or unacknowledged, dreams through them is always by their side.
  • Jung and the Story of Our Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975) pt. 1

Venture to the Interior (1951)

New York: William Morrow and Co

• It is the not-yet in the now,
  The taste of fruit that does not-yet exist
  Hanging the blossom on the bough.
  • Pt. 2, ch. 4

• Life is its own journey, presupposes its own change and movement, and one tries to arrest them at one's eternal peril.
  • Pt. 3, ch. 12

• 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.
  • Pt. 3, ch. 13

Flamingo Feather (1955)

London: The Hogarth Press

The buffalo's powerful head darkening the yellow grass...has more of the quintessential Africa in it for me than any other manifestation of all the scores of animals that I know and love.

• Africa has always walked in my mind proudly upright, an African giant among the other continents, toes well dug into the final ocean of one hemisphere, rising to its full height in the graying skies of the other; head and shoulders broad, square and enduring, making light of the bagful of blue Mediterranean slung over its back as it marches patiently through time.
  • Ch. 3

• Of all man's inborn dispositions there is none more heroic than the love in him. Everything else accepts defeat and dies, but love will fight no-love every inch of the way.
  • Ch. 7

• The buffalo's powerful head darkening the yellow grass, like the lion's imperative roar and the elephant's long, somnambulistic stride, has more of the quintessential Africa in it for me than any other manifestation of all the scores of animals that I know and love.
  • Ch. 10

The Lost World of the Kalahari (1958)

London: The Hogarth Press

• This is the story of a journey in a great wasteland and a search for some pure remnant of the unique and almost vanished First People of my native land, the Bushmen of Africa.
  • Ch. 1

• Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right.
  • Ch. 3

• By chance (to use the only phrase we have for describing one of the most significant manifestations of life).
  • Ch. 8

A Walk with a White Bushman (1986)

London: Chatto & Windus

• The spirit of man is nomad, his blood bedouin, and love is the aboriginal tracker on the faded desert spoor of his lost self; and so I came to live my life not by conscious plan or prearranged design but as someone following the flight of a bird.
  • Epigraph

• 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.
  • p. 49

• What is most threatening and destructive in human society today is the human being who is split in his own nucleus: it is the fission in the modern soul which makes nuclear fission so dangerous — he is a split atom. He has got to heal himself, make himself whole.
  • p. 50

• Somehow we should learn to know that our problems are our most precious possessions. They are the raw materials of our salvation: no problem — no redemption.
  • pp. 71–72

• The man of the Kalahari is Esau and we are Jacob, and there is a great gulf between us. This sense of property, of possession that we have is utterly foreign to the Esaus of the world. We have, he is.
  • p. 159

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Laurens van der Post on Wikipedia