Alan Paton
Alan Paton
Alan Stewart Patonwas a South African author and anti-apartheid activist...
NationalitySouth African
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 January 1903
country children hate
There is not much talking now. A silence falls upon them all. This is no time to talk of hedges and fields, or the beauties of any country. Sadness and fear and hate, how they well up in the heart and mind, whenever one opens pages of these messengers of doom. Cry for the broken tribe, for the law and the custom that is gone. Aye, and cry aloud for the man who is dead, for the woman and children bereaved. Cry, the beloved country, these things are not yet at an end. The sun pours down on the earth, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy. He knows only the fear of his heart.
men strive
When men are ruled by fear, they strive to prevent the very changes that will abate it.
offence
But to punish and not to restore, that is the greatest of all offences.
men land care
The ground is holy, being even as it came from the Creator. Keep it, guard it, care for it, for it keeps men, guards men, cares for men. Destroy it and man is destroyed.
eye heart men
What broke in a man when he could bring himself to kill another? What broke when he could bring himself to thrust down the knife into the warm flesh, to bring down the axe on the living head, to cleave down between the seeing eyes, to shoot the gun that would drive death into the beating heart?
habit could-have-been has-beens
It was not his habit to dwell on what could have been, but what could never be.
morbid preoccupation found
I have always found that actively loving saves one from a morbid preoccupation with the shortcomings of society.
men inhumanity-to-man trying
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.
stars lying journey
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.
eye cry-the-beloved-country
Happy the eyes that can close
voice done helping
There are voices crying what must be done, a hundred, a thousand voices. But what do they help if one seeks for counsel, for one cries this, and one cries that, and another cries something that is neither this nor that.
johannesburg
All roads lead to Johannesburg.
fear belief power-of-love
It is my belief that the only power which can resist the power of fear is the power of love.
st-francis-of-assisi use taught
St. Francis of Assisi taught me that there is a wound in the Creation and that the greatest use we could make of our lives was to ask to be made a healer of it.