Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.

A visitor is a friend, he brings news, good or bad, which is bread to the hungry minds in lonely places. A real friend who comes to the house is a heavenly messenger, who brings the panis angelorum.

Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.

And were my faith so strong that it could move mountains, that is the mountain that I would make come to me.

No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.

What is man, when you come to think upon him, but a minutely set, ingenious machine for turning with infinite artfulness, the red wine of Shiraz into urine?

In the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect.