Top 1034 Quotes & Sayings by South African Authors - Page 14

The only thing I can say that is wonderful about my mother is she forced me to learn three verses of the Bible every day of my life, and I've read the Bible now five times and it taught me the English language.

I attended school regularly for three years. I learned to read and write. 'Lamb's Tales' from Shakespeare was my favourite reading matter. I stole, by finding, Palgrave's 'Golden Treasury.' These two books, and the 'Everyman' edition of John Keats, were my proudest and dearest possessions, my greatest wealth.

I will try to work very hard not to disappoint the people of South Africa.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

You could be worth $2 billion today and a half a billion tomorrow. It doesn't take much for this to disappear overnight.

In South Africa, being Chinese meant I wasn't white and I wasn't black. I trained in Baragwanath Hospital, the largest black hospital in South Africa. That was around 1976, the time of the Soweto Uprising, when police fired on children and students who were protesting. I was part of the group of interns who volunteered to treat them.

Certainly the party counts a considerable number of intellectuals among its members, but I am by no means disposed to apologise for that.

This is going to sound pretentious and esoteric, but I truly mean it from the bottom of my heart. Acting has always been a spiritual journey for me. The very first project I ever acted on paralleled my experience so perfectly even before I was aware of it.

My main interest is the problem of the singularity. If we can't understand what happened at the singularity we came out of, then we don't seem to have any understanding of the laws of particle physics. I'd be very happy just to understand the last singularity and leave the other ones to future generations.

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.

I respect traditions, you can't walk all over them, but at the same time our world is changing. Life is about moving on.

Time is change; we measure its passing by how much things alter.

The very quick and high sales of the book caught us off guard, but fortunately we got the second edition from the printers at the end of last week and the shops should now be stocked again.

I am a shocker. I like to create controversy. It's my trademark.

The exchange rate of the Rand against the dollar, pound or euro makes South Africa an attractive location. The positive side of this is it gives our artists and technicians an opportunity to work.

Nelson Mandela was an outstanding leader and a mentor for me. I was in South Africa at the time he was released. I was in South Africa when he was inaugurated as the first president.

If you laugh with somebody, then you know you share something.

South Africa is blessed to have women and men like yourselves who have little to give but give what you have with open hands and open hearts.

You have to work hard for what you want to achieve and you have to set goals and dreams and really go for them.

Perhaps because my background is theatrical, I have a great affinity with the classics. Hamlet has always been a character of great interest to me and a character I would really love to play. Or a character in a Tennessee Williams play, maybe Tom in 'The Glass Menagerie.'

I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right.

My goal is to get people thinking and trying to wrap their heads around the amazing things that have been achieved and to dream about what will be achieved.

All of my life had been spent in the shadow of apartheid. And when South Africa went through its extraordinary change in 1994, it was like having spent a lifetime in a boxing ring with an opponent and suddenly finding yourself in that boxing ring with nobody else and realising you've to take the gloves off and get out, and reinvent yourself.

The U.N. has been so disappointing to date on the whole Rwanda issue that despite the people they've sent through, and I have no doubt their competence, in the end, the decision is going to be made by other people and not by them.

If the coach is good, I don't think a psychologist is needed.

The candidates before you know that the IFP has set up a system of deployed IFP national and provincial leaders who are not only monitoring the performance of candidates during these elections but will also do so after these elections.

I always wanted children but I was scared. Being responsible for a baby is such a big thing so I was nervous!

And I believe that it becomes a troubled continent because there are those who must always cause confusion so that we do not keep these natural resources.

There's so much more to life than golf. Family is always first.

I'm the kind of person who doesn't really focus on more negativity. I'm a positive person, and I look at things in a positive way.

We will accelerate our land redistribution program not only to redress a grave historical injustice but also to bring more producers into the agricultural sector and to make more land available for cultivation.

What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another?

The ANC party from time to time comes with legislation which, if accepted and if not nullified by the constitution of court, would have the effect of undermining the constitution and eroding its values.

I want to live my life naked, with all my little naked kids naked in the garden.

Gee, I am a complete Luddite when it comes to computers, I can barely log on!

We cannot pretend we do not have problems; we cannot pretend things are not wrong in our country. A lot of things are wrong.

We work. You don't come here to take life easy. And we all got rich from it, so, you know, there's a benefit from it.

When the situation politically became intolerable within South Africa, we used the arts as a weapon for change.

People do write books.

I just want to be myself and go for my own dreams and goals.

I am not a fake. I am natural. I am just being Caster. I don't want to be someone I don't want to be. I don't want to be someone people want me to be. I just want to be me. I was born like this. I don't want any changes.

Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area.

The biggest problem in South Africa is that we have a disrupted timeline. Historically, politically, spiritually, economically, in people's minds, in people's heads.

A lot of America is kind of done. People have been making films about it for 100 years. Everything to me feels used up. But Jo-Burg feels unbelievably inspirational to me.

When I left South Africa there were 10 million people - when I came back there were more than 40 million. I had to learn how to get to the highways because when I left where there were no highways.

I want to get faster every year, keep my confidence high, so I can continue dominating my main events and extend my range to other freestyle and medley races.

All I do is look, listen and try to make sense of what I find, in biological terms.

You can't try and make something you think someone else will like. You can only make what you like. How can you make a song that Yo-Landi Visser likes? You don't know me. You'll never understand me.

The massive thing that has changed for me was the game management aspect. I still get it wrong sometimes, we all do, when to attack and when to kick, how to control the game, speeding it up and slowing it down. Whereas I used to just go flat out, as hard as I can, get the ball out and get to the ruck as quick as possible.

Primarily I'm a social commentator rather than someone who's out to get the belly laugh.

It's good to be intuitive.

How hard it is to make your thoughts look anything but imbecile fools when you paint them with ink on paper.

There's no stopping same-sex dancing couples. I don't understand how people being happy can affect others so much - just let them be.

Hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.

In the rest of Europe, dance is seen as a sport and in the UK it's seen as an art. And art isn't subsidised in the same way sport is.

It is the function of creative man to perceive and to connect the seemingly unconnected.

I suppose comedy is my first love, in a way.

Team is all about vision, goal and ambition... It's about wanting to be the best you can be as a group.

You can't legislate into existence an act of forgiveness and a true confession; those are mysteries of the human heart, and they occur between one individual and another individual, not a panel of judges sitting asking questions, trying to test your truth.

Food never ends. It's one of the greatest things about working on food - we're always going to need food.