Top 60 Beryl Markham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If a man has any greatness in him, it comes to light, not in one flamboyant hour, but in the ledger of his daily work.”

— Beryl Markham

2. “After that, work and hope. But never hope more than you work.”

— Beryl Markham

3. “The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.”

— Beryl Markham

4. “A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.”

— Beryl Markham

5. “Success breeds confidence.”

— Beryl Markham

6. “That’s what makes death so hard – unsatisfied curiosity.”

— Beryl Markham

7. “I learned what every dreaming child needs to know, that no horizon is so far you cannot get above it or beyond it.”

— Beryl Markham

8. “I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesterdays are burried deep-leave it anyway except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can.”

— Beryl Markham

9. “You can live a lifetime and at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself.”

— Beryl Markham

10. “I have a trunk containing continents.”

— Beryl Markham

11. “A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.”

— Beryl Markham

12. “No human pursuit achieves dignity unless it can be called work, and when you can experience a physical loneliness for the tools of your trade, you see that the other things – the experiments, the irrelevant vocations, the vanities you used to hold – were false to you.”

— Beryl Markham

13. “It is really this that makes death so hard – curiosity unsatisfied.”

— Beryl Markham

14. “There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa...”

— Beryl Markham

15. “I knew too little of Africa to leave it, and what I knew I loved too much.”

— Beryl Markham

16. “No human pursuit achieves dignity until it can be called work.”

— Beryl Markham

17. “Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it. I have learned this, but like everyone, I learned it late.”

— Beryl Markham

18. “Roots of the weed sucked first life from the genesis of earth and hold the essence of it still. Always the weed returns; the cultured plant retreats before it.”

— Beryl Markham

19. “Silence is never so impenetrable as when the whisper of steel on paper strives to pierce it.”

— Beryl Markham

20. “I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.”

— Beryl Markham

21. “It is no good telling yourself that one day you will wish you had never made that change; it is no good anticipating regrets. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.”

— Beryl Markham

22. “In Africa people learn to serve each other. They live on credit balances of little favors that they give and may, one day, ask to have returned.”

— Beryl Markham

23. “Africa is never the same to anyone who leaves it and returns again. It is not a land of change, but it is a land of moods and its moods are numberless.”

— Beryl Markham

24. “One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day that will be an airborne life.”

— Beryl Markham

25. “There are all kinds of silences and each of them means a different thing.”

— Beryl Markham

26. “The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all.”

— Beryl Markham

27. “Life had a different shape; it had new branches and some of the old branches were dead.”

— Beryl Markham

28. “A man can be riddled with malaria for years on end, with its chills and its fevers and its nightmares, but if one day he sees that the water from his kidneys is black, he knows he will not leave that place again, wherever he is, or wherever he hoped to be.”

— Beryl Markham

29. “Africa is less a wilderness than a repository of primary and fundamental values, and less a barbaric land than an unfamiliar voice.”

— Beryl Markham

30. “There is respect for a heart like yours, and if its beating stop, the spirit lives to guard the ways you wandered.”

— Beryl Markham

31. “In the family of continents, Africa is the silent, the brooding sister, courted for centuries by knight-errant empires – rejecting them one by one and severally, because she is too sage and a little bored with the importunity of it all.”

— Beryl Markham

32. “You can live a lifetime and, at the end of it, know more about other people than you know about yourself. You learn to watch other people, but you never watch yourself because you strive against loneliness. If you read a book, or shuffle a deck of cards, or care for a dog, you are avoiding yourself. The abhorrence of loneliness is as natural as wanting to live at all. If it were otherwise, men would never have bothered to make an alphabet, nor to have fashioned words out of what were only animal sounds, nor to have crossed continents – each man to see what the other looked like.”

— Beryl Markham

33. “A domesticated lion is only an unnatural lion – and whatever is unnatural is untrustworthy.”

— Beryl Markham

34. “But, for a little while, this is the place for us – a good place too – a place of good omen, a place of beginning things – and of ending things I never thought would end.”

— Beryl Markham

35. “What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and color and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker’s rack.”

— Beryl Markham

36. “To see ten thousand animals untamed and not branded with the symbols of human commerce is like scaling an unconquered mountain for the first time, or like finding a forest without roads or footpaths, or the blemish of an axe. You know then what you had always been told – that the world once lived and grew without adding machines and newsprint and brick-walled streets and the tyranny of clocks.”

— Beryl Markham

37. “I am incapable of a profound remark on the workings of Destiny. It seems to get up early and go to bed very late, and it acts most generously toward the people who nudge it off the road whenever they meet it.”

— Beryl Markham

38. “A life has to move or it stagnates.”

— Beryl Markham

39. “For all professional pilots there exists a kind of guild, without charter and without by-laws. it demands no requirements for inclusion save an understanding of the wind, the compass, the rudder, and fair fellowship.”

— Beryl Markham

40. “Being alone in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day, irrevocably alone, with nothing to observe but your instruments and your own hands in semi-darkness, nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind – such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger.”

— Beryl Markham

41. “Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company – and so talk goes out through the lips.”

— Beryl Markham

42. “Boredom, like hookworm, is endemic.”

— Beryl Markham

43. “In view of this and other things, I demand forgiveness for being so obviously impressed with my own parents.”

— Beryl Markham

44. “Who thinks it just to be judged by a single error?”

— Beryl Markham

45. “If your hunch proves a good one, you were inspired; if it proves bad, you are guilty of yielding to thoughtless impulse.”

— Beryl Markham

46. “To her all things are poignantly lacking – but she is incapable of desiring anything.”

— Beryl Markham

47. “We laughed at some things because we had grown so much older; we were serious about others because we were still so young.”

— Beryl Markham

48. “The world grows bigger as the light leaves it. There are no boundaries and no landmarks. The trees and the rocks and the anthills begin to disappear, one by one, whisked away under the magical cloak of evening.”

— Beryl Markham

49. “Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of it’s coming is lost. You fly forever, weary with an invariable scene, and when you are at last released from its monotony, you remember nothing of it because there was nothing there.”

— Beryl Markham

50. “It was a world as old as Time, but as new as Creation’s hour had left it.”

— Beryl Markham