It’s really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry,” said Angus Lordie. “In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.

Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other–and land,...

Myth is a cloud based upon a shadow based upon the movement of the breeze.

She did not think that those who were late, or the ancestors themselves, would wish punishment upon us, no matter what our transgressions. It was far more likely that there would be love, falling like rain from above, changing the hearts of the wicked; transforming them

We live in a culture of complaint because everyone is always looking for things to complain about. It’s all tied in with the desire to blame others for misfortunes and to get some form of compensation into the bargain.

…the real poison within families is not the poison that you put in your food, but the poison that grows up in the heart when people are jealous of one another and cannot speak these feelings and drain out the poison that way.

It was time to take the pumpkin out of the pot and eat it. In the final analysis, that was what solved these big problems of life. You could think and think and get nowhere, but you still had to eat your pumpkin. That brought you down to earth. That gave you a reason for...

Men are very sensitive, Mma Makutsi. You would not always think it to look at them, but they are. They do not like you to point out that they are wrong, even when they are. That is the way things are, Mma–it just is.

Out in Saxe-Coburg Street she stood still for a moment and looked at the gardens. He kissed me, she thought. He made the move; I didn’t. The thought was an overwhelming one and invested the everyday world about her, the world of the square, of trees, of people walking by, with a curious glow, a...

Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious...

She would not allow herself to remember how Note had treated her, and many others too, she suspected. She had forgiven him, yes, but she still did not like to remember. And perhaps a deliberate act of forgetting went along with forgiveness. You forgave, and then you said to yourself: Now I shall forget. Because...

So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one’s own life better: acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their own solution?

Neighbours are given to us on the same basis as we are given our families. There is no element of choice involved – none at all.

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,...

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.

Be content with who you are and where you are, and do whatever you can do to bring to others such contentment, and joy, and understanding that you have managed to find yourself.

Boys, men,” she said. “They’re all the same. They think that this [their manhood] is something special and they’re all so proud of it. They do not know how ridiculous it is.

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...

You can go through life and make new friends every year – every month practically – but there was never any substitute for those friendships of childhood that survive into adult years. Those are the ones in which we are bound to one another with hoops of steel.

A moral dilemma is equally absorbing whether the stakes are the destiny of nations or the happiness of one or two people – at the most.

There was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe — the only lady private detective in Botwana — brewed tea. And three mugs — one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need?

Myth could be as sustaining as reality – sometimes even more so.

The house seemed so different at night. Everything was in its correct place, of course, but somehow the furniture seemed more angular and the pictures on the wall more one-dimensional. She remembered somebody saying that at night we are all strangers, even to ourselves, and this struck her as being true.

…it must be odd to have no ambition, not to want something more.

There was a distinction between lying and telling half-truths, but it was a very narrow one.

He will be a small man inside,” said Mma Ramotswe. “He will feel small and unimportant. That is why he needs to put ladies down, Mma. Men who are big inside never feel the need to do that.

Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away–or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people–to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world...

The forges of friendship, thought Angus, may be busy ones, but their dorrs are always open.

If we treated others with the consideration that one would give to those who only had a few days to live, then we would be kinder, at least.

Now the tea began to do its work- as it always did- and the world that only a few minutes previously had seemed so bleak started to seem less so.

we must love those with whom we live and work, and love them for all their failings, manifest and manifold though they be.

Memories of that which we have lost are curious things – weeks, months, even years may pass without recollection of them and then, quite suddenly, something will remind us of a lost friend, or of a favourite possession that has been mislaid or destroyed, and then we think: Yes, that is what I have had...

She was of traditional build herself, but her figure was largely concealed by the folds of a generously cut shift dress made out of a flecked green fabric. It was like a tent, thought Mma Ramotswe–a camouflage tent of the sort that the Botswana Defence Force might use. But I do not sit in judgement...

She had argued for a broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different complexion to a matter, but on subsequent thought she had revised her position.Although she still believed that one should be frank in answers to questions, this duty arose only where...

Men can be teenagers until well into their twenties. That is well known

That of all people, it should be him; that took her aback. That the heart should settle on somebody like him; that surprised her. But she was so certain about it, so certain.

Now constipation was quite a different matter…It would be dreadful for the whole world to know about troubles of that nature. She felt terribly sorry for people who suffered from constipation, and she knew that there were many who did. There were probably enough of them for a political party – which a chance of...

The problem, of course, was that people did not seem to understand the difference between right and wrong. They needed to be reminded about this, because if you left it to them to work out for themselves, they would never bother. They would just find out what was best for them, and then they would...

Just for Paris. You don’t have to be my friend forever – just for Paris.

Mma Ramotswe decided to go back into her office. There was a curious thing about male conversation that she had noticed – men often ended up poking fun at one another. Women did this only rarely, but men seemed to love insulting one another. It was very strange.

That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

Isabel is looking at several collections of research journals. ‘She would understand the issues if she chose to open one of the volumes, but she knew that there were conversations within which she would never have the time to participate in. And that, of course, was the problem with any large collection of books, whether...

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a World Service broadcast on her radio one day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived in France. These French people said that you should just live in a way which made...

Our stomachs live in towns,” said Mma Potokwani, patting the front of her dress. ‘That is where the work is. Our stomachs know that. But our hearts are usually somewhere else.

Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things. He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl. He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. Any why should he not dress up in feathers and...

For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more … apologetic.

We can’t have moral obligations to every single person in this world. We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter into our moral space, so to speak. That means neighbors, people we deal with, and so on.

Dieting was cruel; it was an abuse of human rights. Yes, that’s what it was, and she should not allow herself to be manipulated in this way. She stopped herself. Thinking like that was nothing more than coming up with excuses for breaking the diet. Mma Ramotswe was made of sterner stuff than that, and...

Matthew knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice – based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudiced and muddled folk wisdom – how...

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.