Remembering Nelson Mandela: Quotes, Poems & Passages

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Nelson Mandela once said, "It is never my custom to use words lightly. If 27 years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die."

Indeed, Nelson Mandela, the hero of millions, has uttered and written many words of wisdom and inspiration throughout his lifetime. Here are some of his best quotes:

"A good head and a good heart always a formidable combination"

"Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another."

"I learned that courage was the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear."

"For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects the freedom of others." 

"There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living."

"It always seems impossible until it's done."

"Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again."

"In my country we go to prison first and then become president."

"Man's goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished." 

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world."

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the way in which you yourself have altered."

"If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner." 

"After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb."

"It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership."

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Besides composing his own words of wisdom, Mandela had some good taste in poems and passages. For example, while Nelson Mandela was imprisoned on Robben Island, he discovered the poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley and loved its message. As seen in the 2009 film of the same name, Mandela often recited the poem to other prisoners.

Below is Henley's "Invictus" poem in its entirety:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance 
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

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When Mandela became the President of South Africa in 1994, he sent the captain of the South African rugby team a copy of the "Man in the Arena" passage – also quoted by Brené Brown in her TED talk about vulnerability – from President Theordore "Teddy" Roosevelt's "Citizenship in a Republic"speech. Mandela inspired the South African rugby team to defeat my other home country New Zealand in the 1995 Rugby World Cup final in an emotional sweep. As seen in the film Invictus, Mandela walked onto the field after the win wearing the South African team's green rugby jersey as 80,000 fans burst into chants of "Nel-son! Nel-son!"

Teddy Roosevelt's "Man in the Arena" passage goes as follows:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." 

Celebrating Mark Twain's Birthday with His Words of Wisdom (and Humour)

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Hailed as the Father of American Literature by William Faulkner, Twain is the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a "Great American Novel" because it accurately represented the United States at the time it was written.

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which served as the setting of many of his books. When he was young, he worked as a typesetter for a magazine before he discovered he was good at writing humour (we may read The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County). Twain liked to make fun of people in the upper classes. He was the first author to use American dialect – the way Americans speak – and humour.

Twain was born on November 30, 1835 during a visit by Halley's Comet, which can be seen from Earth every 75 to 76 years. Twain predicted that he would die when Halley's Comet came back, and he was right! He died on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet returned.

To celebrate his birthday, here are some of Mark Twain's best quotes:

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"If you always tell truth, you don't have to remember anything."

"A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read."

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started."

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

"Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest."

"Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please."

"Kindness is the language which the deaf can see and the blind can see."

"The best way to cheer yourself up is to try cheer somebody else up."

"Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company." 

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." 

Happy Birthday Fyodor Dostoevsky!

To live without hope is to cease to live. 

– Fyodor Dostoevsky

Ever since we started celebrating the birthdays of beloved authors like Roald Dahl, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Shel Silverstein and T. S. Eliot in my "Famous Author Birthday" series, I've been waiting for November 11. Today, we get to celebrate the birthday of one of my all time favourite authors – Fyodor Dostoevsky. Please join me in wishing him a very С Днем Рождения (happy birthday in Russian)!

Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11, 1821 – 9 February, 1881) was a Russian author, essayist and philosopher. His most famous works include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, all of which are amongst some of my favourite books.

Dostoevsky, along with Leo Tolstoy, is considered one of the greatest authors of the Golden Age of Russian literature. His books have been translated into more than 170 languages! Not only that, he has influenced a lot – and I mean a lot – of writers, philosophers, scientists and psychologists. Albert Einstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Anton Chekhov, Herman Hesse, Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Kurt Vonnegut (who incidentally shares the same birthday – happy birthday Kurt Vonnegut!) are all fans of his work!

Dostoevsky's notes for Chapter 5 of The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoevsky's novels are often very complex, and his characters very dark. He joined a lot of different points of views and voices together to explore many deep themes including religion, guilt, dreams, emotions, visions and human nature. To give an example, the picture to the left is his notes for one chapter of The Brothers Karamzov. His works encompass so many ideas and themes that I will leave it up to him to do the explaining himself with a quote.

Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.

Dostoevsky was the reason I fell in love with Russian literature, and I hope that one day you, my students, will get the chance to read at least one of his books and feel for yourself what a mind-blowing experience it really is! To conclude, here is some advice from the very wise man himself:

Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to live.

– The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

P.S. To find out more about our Kurt Vonnegut, our other birthday boy, the Huffington Post wrote a wonderful post about what Vonnegut can teach us about life.

Join the Universe in Wishing Carl Sagan a Big Bang of a Birthday!

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This weekend we celebrate the birthday of beloved American astronomer, astrophysicist and cosmologist Carl Sagan on November 9. Sagan was born in 1934 and died in 1996.

Carl Sagan is famous for contributing to people's understanding of the cosmos – the universe – as a whole. He is the author of the science book and TV series Cosmos. Cosmos covered many scientific topics such as the origin of life and our place in the Universe. He also wrote the novel Contact, which was made into a movie in 1997.

Because Carl Sagan was able to communicate complex ideas very easily, he helped people understand our place, as humans, in the universe. He taught us how small the Earth is compared to the Universe but at the same time emphasized the value and importance of the human race. Sagan's work helped to discover the high surface temperatures on Venus, the second planet from the sun. His research also deals with the possibilities of extraterrestrial life (aliens!).

In honour of his birthday, here, from the 11th episode of Cosmos, is a quote from Sagan about the magic of books:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It is a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Rest In Peace, Tom Clancy

The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.

– Tom Clancy

Tom Clancy, one of America's most successful espionage and military novel authors, died on Tuesday October 1 in a hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. He was 66.

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Tom Clancy is best known for his complex and detailed spy and military novels, 17 of which have made it to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. He is the creator of the Jack Ryan series, which has been adapted into four films – The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears – with a fifth one on the way. Actors Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford and Ben Affleck appeared as the titular character Jack Ryan, a CIA analyst, in the films. The upcoming film is titled Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit and features Chris Pine (Captain Kirk from Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness) as Jack Ryan.

Tom Clancy also co-founded Red Storm Entertainment, a video game development company that was later purchased by Ubisoft Entertainment. His next book Command Authority is set to be published in December this year.

According to the New York Times, when Tom Clancy was growing up, he didn't read much children's literature (like we are doing in our classes). Instead, he was obsessed with naval history, reading lots and lots of military and engineering books about submarine warfare, espionage, missile systems and secret plans between countries. He aspired to join the military but found his eyesight wasn't good enough. Besides looking all cool and military-esque with his aviators in the photo below, he did end up doing what he loved despite not joining the military, because he believed that...

The only way to do all the things you'd like to do is to read.

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Happy Birthday Old Possum!

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

– T.S. Eliot

Continuing the theme of famous author birthdays (It's just never ending this week...), September 26 is the birthday of American/British poet T. S. Eliot, who would have turned 125!

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Even though Tom Eliot is often hailed as "one of the twentieth century's major poets," he did not have to write a lot of poems to achieve this status. He believed that the only thing that mattered is that his poems were "perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."

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The poem that made him famous is called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. After that, he wrote his most famous work The Waste Land. The famous quotes "April is the cruellest month" and "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" come from this poem. He is also the poet behind The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets.


Later on in his life, he wrote the book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats for his godchildren (Eliot did not have any children of his own). In this book, he used the name "Old Possum" because it was the nickname that his good friend, editor and fellow poet Ezra Pound gave him. Although you may not have heard of this book of cat poems, chances are you have heard of the musical in which people jump around the stage in cat costumes. Yep, the Broadway musical Cats was inspired by this book!

To conclude this post, here are some lovely quotes from Old Possum himself:

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

Happy Birthday William Faulkner & Shel Silverstein!

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There's no shortage of famous author birthdays this week. Besides F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was born on September 23, September 25 is the birthday of American authors William Faulkner and Shel Silverstein.

Faulkner, who was born in 1897, won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 for his "powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel" and is most famous for the books The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. 

Like Fitzgerald, Faulkner also had a lot to say about writing. Here are some of the best quotes about how to be a writer from an article published in the Huffington Post for his birthday. 

The best writers are insatiable 

Ninety-nine percent talent... ninety-nine percent discipline... ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

A writer must be a reader 

Read, read, read. Read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window. 

Shel Silverstein, who you may also know as Uncle Shelby, was also born on September 25, but in 1930. To celebrate Shel Silverstein's birthday, here is a video of him narrating his most famous book, The Giving Tree, in 1973.

F. Scott Fitzgerald on Great Writing

Just last week we celebrated our beloved Roald Dahl's birthday. This week, it's American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday. Born on September 24, 1896, F. Scott Fitzgerald is often considered one of the greatest American writers in the 20th Century. He is the known for Tender is the Night, The Beautiful and the Damned, the short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and his most famous work, The Great Gatsby, which was recently made into a film.

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He wrote most of his greatest work during the 1920s, a period he coined as "The Jazz Age". As depicted in the film Midnight in Paris, during the twenties, he frequently visited Paris with his wife Zelda and became good friends with fellow American author Ernest Hemingway. 

To celebrate F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday, blogger Maria Popova dug up some letters written by F. Scott Fitzgerald to a family friend and his daughter, Scottie, that offer some advice about what makes great writing.

Here are some excerpts from his letters, for all my aspiring student writers:

"You've got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the techniques which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell . . . [Literature] is one of those professions that wants the 'works.' You wouldn't be interested in a soldier who was only a little brave."

– Letter to Frances, November 9, 1938

"Nobody ever became a writer just by wanting to be one. If you have anything to say, anything you feel nobody has ever said before, you have got to feel it so desperately that you will find some way to say it that nobody has ever found before, so that the thing you have to say and the way of saying it blend as one matter – as indissolubly as if they were conceived together."

– Letter to Scottie, October 20, 1936