Nelson Mandela

It always seems impossible until it is done.

A good head and a good heart are always a formidable combination.

Any man or institution that tries to rob me of my dignity will lose.

Difficulties break some men but make others.

Courageous people do not fear forgiving, for the sake of peace.

I am the captain of my soul.

Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.

Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential – there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

The perception of beauty is a moral test.

Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience.

Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.

It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

Round numbers are always false.

Worthless people love only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who have never dared to think or to act.

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.

I began to realize how important it was to be an enthusiast in life. White hot and passionate is the only thing to be.

If I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.