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"Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across."
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"Any church that is overly emphasizing the role of miracles is encouraging his members to be indolent."
"Personal Responsibility is when a person sees a problem and refuses to be indifferent, but decides to rather look for ways and means of resolving the problem."
"When you blame others you are effectively proclaiming that you are only response to stimuli."
"When you spent your time, you are actually spending your life."
"When we are telling people to depend on favor rather than qualification, we are actually preparing a ground for our country to collapse."
"It is your life, accept the responsibility."
"Stop blaming people for not helping you. No matter how your teacher teaches you to recite a poem, you can't wear her smiling face to the platform. You've got to put that smile on your own face."
"We are the author of our own destruction."
"We turn our attention to the government and we whine about the incompetence of the police, we also complain about the breakdown in law and order. Yet, we forget that we actually had a role to play in the consequences we are reaping."
"The time is coming when each of us will have to give an account of our stewardship."
Explore more quotes by Alexander McCall Smith
"She brought a chair into the room and placed it alongside the top of his bed. Then she held his hand as he drifted off to sleep. It was so small in her own hand, and it felt warm and dry. She pressed his hand gently, and his fingers returned the pressure, but only just, as he was almost asleep by then. She remembered, but not very well, what it was to fall asleep holding the hand of another; how precious such an experience, how fortunate those to whom it was vouchsafed by the gods of Friendship, or of Love. She thought she had forgotten that, but now she remembered."
"His sixth year, it seemed to him, had lasted a remarkably long time and there were points at which he frankly wondered whether he would ever turn seven. But now it was the night before his birthday, and barring some cosmic disaster, the advent of some unexpected black hole into which the earth might be sucked, with the attendant reversal or suspension of time, in very few hours he would be waking up to a world in which he was numbered among the seven-year-olds."
"He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands."
"We chose younger and younger politicians to lead us because they looked good on television and were sharp. But really we should be looking for wisdom, and choosing people who had acquired it; and such people, in general, looked bad on television - gray, lined, thoughtful."
"She believed in getting as much use as possible from everything, and thought that as long as machinery, or anything else, could be cajoled into operation, it should be kept; to do otherwise, she thought, was wasteful."
"Mma Ramotswe tucked the cheque safely away in her bodice. Modern business methods were all very well, she thought, but when it came to the safeguarding of money there were some places which had yet to be bettered."
"I said to him that Zululand sounded fine, but that every man has a map in his heart of his own country and that the heart will never allow you to forget this map."
"It is hard, she thought, it is hard for us to think of people who dislike us because none of us, in our heart, believes that we deserve the hatred of others."
"It's through the small things that we develop our moral imagination, so that we can understand the sufferings of others."
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