41 Africa Quotes That Will Have You Booking A Flight

Are you searching for some quotes about Africa? A good Africa quote can get you dreaming about a trip to the magical continent.

There’s something truly extraordinary about Africa that even these quotes can’t describe. It’s a remarkable place that some never even want to leave.

We frequently search for as many Africa captions as possible to go with our Instagram safari photos of far-off destinations in the bush. Some of these African quotes are nothing new, but sometimes, it can be hard to find exactly what you are trying to convey, so we put together our favorites for you.

Unique Quotes About Africa

(Safari Quotes 1-10)

“Africa changes you forever, like nowhere on earth. Once you have been there, you will never be the same. But how do you begin to describe its magic to someone who has never felt it? How can you explain the fascination of this vast, dusty continent, whose oldest roads are elephant paths? Could it be because Africa is the place of all our beginnings, the cradle of mankind, where our species first stood upright on the savannahs of long ago?”

-Brian Jackman

“You cannot leave Africa, Africa said. It is always with you, there inside your head. Our rivers run in currents in the swirl of your thumbprints; our drumbeats counting out your pulse; our coastline the silhouette of your soul.”

-Bridget Dore

“If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?”

― Isak Dinesen

“Wilderness gave us knowledge. Wilderness made us human. We came from here. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel a strong bond to this land called Serengeti; it is the land of our youth.”

― Boyd Norton

“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted”

– Bill Bryson

“Africa has her mysteries, and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them.”

-Miriam Makeba

“Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”

― J. Nozipo Maraire

“The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say ‘Africa’. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.”

― Ryszard Kapuściński

“During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

― Nelson Mandela

“There is something about safari life that makes you forget all your sorrows and feel as if you had drunk half a bottle of champagne — bubbling over with heartfelt gratitude for being alive.”

-Karen Blixen

Karen Blixen is the author of Out of Africa, one of the best books about Africa. This is Africa quote above is one of my favorites from her.

(Safari Quotes 10 – 20)

“Africa – You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the Hand of God. You watch the slope lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heart, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world.”

– Jodi Picoult

Why is it you can never hope to describe the emotion Africa creates? You are lifted. Out of whatever pit, unbound from whatever tie, released from whatever fear. You are lifted and you see it all from above.”

-Francesca Marcian

“If I have ever seen magic, it has been in Africa.”

-John Hemingway

“Reminds me of my safari in Africa. Somebody forgot the corkscrew and for several days we had to live on nothing but food and water.”

-W. C. Fields

“It’s really beautiful. It feels like God visits everywhere else but lives in Africa.”

-Will Smith

“Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, an escapist’s Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just home.”

-Beryl Markham

Everything in Africa bites, but the safari bug is worst of all.”

–Brian Jackman

“For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by ‘Africa,’ by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony.”

-Henry Louis Gates

“There is always something new out of Africa.”

-Pliny the Elder

“But African time was not the same as American time…As African time passed, I surmised that the pace of Western countries was insane, that the speed of modern technology accomplished nothing, and that because Africa was going its own way at its own pace for its own reasons, it was a refuge and a resting place.”

-Paul Theroux

(It’s true there is such a thing as Africa time and it is wonderful!)

(Safari Quotes 20-30)

“I have loved no part of the world like this and I have loved no women as I love you. You’re my human Africa. I love your smell as I love these smells. I love your dark bush as I love the bush here, you change with the light as this place does, so that one all the time is loving something different and yet the same. I want to spill myself out into you as I want to die here.”

-Graham Greene

“The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past.”

-Barack Obama

“You cannot leave Africa, ” Africa said, “It is always with you, there inside your head. Our rivers run in currents in the swirl of your thumbprints; Our drumbeats counting out your pulse; Our coastline, the silhouette of your soul”

-– Bridge Dore

“People must feel that the natural world is important and valuable and beautiful and wonderful and an amazement and a pleasure”

– David Attenborough

“Every mountain top is within reach if you just keep climbing.”

-Barry Finlay

“You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.”

-Karen Blixen

“The biggest lesson from Africa was that life’s joys come mostly from relationships and friendships, not from material things. I saw time and again how much fun Africans had with their families and friends and on the sports fields; they laughed all the time.”

-Andrew Shue

“I hope you have an experience that alters the course of your life because, after Africa, nothing has ever been the same”

– Suzanne Evans

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

-African proverb.

“When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find out that it is the same for all the Music.”

-Karen Blixen

(Another fantastic quote about Africa from Karen Blixen)

(Safari Quotes 30-41)

“Africa has her mysteries and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them.”

-Miriam Makeba

“The only man I envy is the man who has not yet been to Africa – for he has so much to look forward to.”

-Richard Mullin

“If there were one more thing I could do, it would be to go on safari once again.”

-Karen Blixen

“I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke up that I was not happy.”

-Ernest Hemingway

“When you leave Africa, as the plane lifts, you feel that more than leaving a continent you’re leaving a state of mind. Whatever awaits you at the other end of your journey will be of a different order of existence.”

-Francesca Marciano

“There is a language going on out there – the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops and chirps have meaning derived over eons of expression…we have yet to become fluent in the language – and music – of the wild.”

-Boyd Norton

“They say that somewhere in Africa the elephants have a secret grave where they go to lie down, unburden their wrinkled gray bodies, and soar away, light spirits at the end.”

-Robert R. McCammon

“You either get the point of Africa or you don’t. What draws me back year after year is that it’s like seeing the world with the lid off.”

― AA Gill

“Nothing but breathing the air of Africa, and actually walking through it, can communicate the indescribable sensations.”

– William Burchell

“There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa — and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else’s, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. … Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.”

-Beryl Markham

“You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself.”

-Malcolm X

(Ending this list of Africa quotes with a great and serious one from Malcolm X)

Are we missing any famous quotes about Africa that we should add?

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About Natasha Alden