We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.

You cannot fear life--you must embrace it.

There seems to be a superstition among many thousands of our young who hold hands and smooch in the drive-ins that marriage is a cottage surrounded by perpetual hollyhocks, to which a perpetually young and handsome husband comes home to a perpetually young and ravishing wife. When the hollyhocks wither and boredom and bills appear, the divorce courts are jammed.

Anyone who imagines that bliss is normal is going to waste a lot of time running around shouting that he's been robbed. The fact is that most putts don't drop. Most beef is tough. Most children grow up to be just ordinary people. Most successful marriages require a high degree of mutual toleration. Most jobs are more often dull than otherwise. . . .

Life is like an old-time rail journey--delays, sidetracks, smoke, dust, cinders, and jolts, interspersed only occasionally by beautiful vistas and thrilling bursts of speed. The trick is to thank the Lord for letting you have the ride.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children.
Men have the same choice we’ve always had: work or prison.

I have no doubt whatever that most people live, whether physically, intellectually, or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed…. We all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well.

Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.' It is all these things but one thing - it is never dull.

From the time I arrived in British east Africa at the indifferent age of four and went through the barefoot state of early youth hunting wild pig with the Nandi, later training race-horses for a living, and still later scouting Tanganyika and the waterless bush country between the Tana and Athi Rivers, by aeroplane, for elephant, I remained so happily provincial I was unable to discuss boredom of being alive with any intelligence until I had gone to London and lived there a year. Boredom, like hookworm is endemic.

Love, love, take the first step. Everything depends on love. Even professional success means feeling that life loves you, that your managers, bosses and colleagues are not enemies.

To see the true character of a person
judge them not by how they treat those they love,
but how they treat those they hate.