It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.

There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing

Denys (Finch-Hatton) has been written about before and he will be written about again. If someone has not already said it, someone will say that he was a great man who never achieved greatness, and this will not only be trite, but wrong; he was a great man who never achieved arrogance.

In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires - rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.

A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.

A map in the hands of a pilot is a testimony of a man's faith in other men; it is a symbol of confidence and trust. It is not like a printed page that bears mere words, ambiguous and artful, and whose most believing reader - even whose author, perhaps - must allow in his mind a recess for doubt. A map says to you, 'Read me carefully, follow me closely, doubt me not.' It says, 'I am the earth in the palm of your hand. Without me, you are alone and lost.