CAIRO -- Nelson Mandela's death Thursday has stirred international sorrow, with many commentators -- even those who've never visited South Africa or fully understood his long struggle to end apartheid -- describing him as the world's last great noble man.

His words are quoted almost as if they were religious texts, even when he was calling for weapons for his cause and rejecting his country's government, a legacy that at one time made him one of the world's most controversial figures.

Mandela's perseverance transcended his battle against apartheid and the struggle of his times. His words on forgiveness, reconciliation and peace went beyond his country and spoke both to the world's struggles and to a man's everyday fight in his own life.

A review of his letters, speeches and interviews, dating to 1951, captures Mandela's evolution and vision -- and makes clear why his words captivated and inspired the world so much that even an unsurprising death at age 95 evoked a sadness worldwide, a singular loss of someone whose influence spanned generations.

Nearly two decades ago, he contemplated death -- and declared himself prepared.

"Death is something inevitable," he told an interviewer for the 1996 documentary "Mandela." "When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity."

During his years in prison, communication was a major goal. He wrote hundreds of letters, speaking without sentimentality about the emotional issues of life -- not being able to go to his mother's funeral in 1968 or that of his son -- with sadness but no bitterness.

"Difficulties break some men but make others," he wrote his then-wife, Winnie Mandela, from the Robben Island prison in 1975.

Upon his release in 1990, he explained one of the many lessons of imprisonment, which would contribute to his emergence as an international symbol of hope.

Children hold placards showing the face of Nelson Mandela as they celebrate his life Friday in the street outside his old house in Soweto, Johannesburg,
Children hold placards showing the face of Nelson Mandela as they celebrate his life Friday in the street outside his old house in Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

"If 27 years in prison have done anything to us, it was to use the silence of solitude to make us understand how precious words are and how real speech is in its impact on the way people live and die," he said in a 2000 speech.

He was constantly self-reflective, with a grander purpose in mind: to maintain his optimism and confidence in the human spirit, even in the face of the oppression.

In his 1995 autobiography, "Long Walk to Freedom," he said he would have been content to be a lawyer were it not for the struggle of his fellow Africans. But he also understood the path he'd set himself upon, contemplating death during his 1964 trial.

"I have fought against white domination and I have fought black domination," he said at the trial. "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 idea for which I am prepared to die."

In 1994, he became South Africa's first democratically elected president. Many asked him when he took office whether he'd exact revenge on those who'd imprisoned him and abused his supporters. He called such thinking a form of imprisonment itself, an obstacle to much-needed reconciliation.

"Today, we no longer vow mutual destruction but solemnly acknowledge our interdependence as free and equal citizens of our common motherland," Mandela said in 1995 on Reconciliation Day, the annual public holiday Dec. 16 that marks the end of apartheid.

"Reconciliation, however, does not mean forgetting or trying to bury the pain of conflict. Reconciliation means working together to correct the legacy of past injustice."

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. In his acceptance he laid out his vision.

"Thus shall we live, because we will have created a society which recognizes that all people are born equal, with each entitled in equal measure to life, liberty, prosperity, human rights and good governance," he said. "Such a society should never allow again that there should be prisoners of conscience nor that any person's human rights should be violated.

"Neither should it ever happen that once more the avenues to peaceful change are blocked by usurpers who seek to take power away from the people, in pursuit of their own ignoble purposes."