I am a weak and sinful man, but God put His hands on me, that is all.
Interpretation
This quote reflects humility and acknowledgment of divine influence in one's life despite personal flaws.
In this quote, Alan Paton expresses a profound sense of personal weakness and imperfection while recognizing the transformative power of God's presence. It highlights the idea that one's flaws do not diminish their worth or capability, and that divine grace can elevate and guide individuals towards a greater purpose, regardless of their sinful nature.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a church sermon to emphasize the power of grace.
Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.
Ask yourself not if this or that is expedient, but if it is right.
One day in Johannesburg, and already the tribe was being rebuilt, the house and soul being restored.
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?
It is not permissible to add to one's possesions if these things can only be done at the cost of other men. Such development has only one true name, and that is exploitation.
If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.
When common objects in this way be come charged with the suggestion of horror, they stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance; and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the darkness a bizarre grotesquerie of appearance that lent to them somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us.
When we get up in the morning, what we put on is very much a reflection of how we see the world and how we want it to see us.
No storyteller has been able to dream up anything as fantastically unlikely as what really does happen in this mad Universe.
Beauty is self-defined, perceived and understood without ambiguity. It's the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.
Much evil must befall a country before it wholly forgets the Elves, if once they dwelt there.
It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played.
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