Isabelle Eberhardt Quotes & Sayings

The way I see it, there is no greater spiritual beauty than fanaticism, of a sort so sincere it can only end in martyrdom. — Isabelle Eberhardt

Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere. — Isabelle Eberhardt

We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.
— Isabelle Eberhardt

Crime, particularly among the poor and downtrodden, is often a last gesture of liberty. — Isabelle Eberhardt

Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures ... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies ... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with discontented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable. — Isabelle Eberhardt

I am not afraid of death, but would not want to die in some obscure or pointless way. — Isabelle Eberhardt

I will only ever be drawn to people who suffer from that special and fertile anguish called self-doubt, or the thirst for the ideal, and desire for the soul's mystical fire. Self-satisfaction because of some material accomplishment will never be for me. The truly great are those who quest for better spiritual selves. — Isabelle Eberhardt

One must use the weapons one finds in one's path. — Isabelle Eberhardt

While to live in the past and think of what was good and beautiful about it amounts to a sort of seasoning of the present, the perennial wait for tomorrow is bound to result in chronic discontent that poisons one's entire outlook. — Isabelle Eberhardt

One must never look for happiness: one meets it by the way. — Isabelle Eberhardt

I feel alone, free, and detached from everything in the world, and I'm happy. — Isabelle Eberhardt

I study life by being close to it, this "native life" about which so little is known, and which is so disfigured by the descriptions of those who, not knowing it, insist on describing it anyway. — Isabelle Eberhardt

For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all. — Isabelle Eberhardt

Oh if at every moment of our lives we could know the consequences of some of the utterings, thoughts and deeds that seem so trivial and unimportant at the time! And should we not conclude from such examples that there is no such thing in life as unimportant moments devoid of meaning for the future? — Isabelle Eberhardt

I am full of the sorrow that goes with changes in surroundings, those successive stages of annihilation that slowly lead to the great and final void. — Isabelle Eberhardt

The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character. — Isabelle Eberhardt

No prayers, no medicines, merely the ineffable happiness of dying. — Isabelle Eberhardt

The cowardly belief that a person must stay in one place is too reminiscent of the unquestioning resignation of animals, beasts of burden stupefied by servitude and yet always willing to accept the slipping on of the harness. There are limits to every domain, and laws to govern every organized power. But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the non-existent horizon, and her empire is an intangible one, for her domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit. — Isabelle Eberhardt

Life on the open road is liberty ... to be alone, to have few needs, to be unknown, everywhere a foreigner and at home, and to walk grandly and solitarily in conquest of the world. — Isabelle Eberhardt

A nomad I will remain for life,
in love with distant and uncharted places. — Isabelle Eberhardt

The savage hatred I feel for crowds is getting worse, natural enemies that they are of imagination and of thought. — Isabelle Eberhardt

A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out. — Isabelle Eberhardt

From every ruin, life springs up again and everything that dies is born again. — Isabelle Eberhardt

To be alone is to be free, and freedom was the only happiness accessible to my nature. — Isabelle Eberhardt

Death does not frighten me, but dying obscurely and above all uselessly does. — Isabelle Eberhardt

I think it is impossible for human minds to think of Death as a final, irrevocable end to life. — Isabelle Eberhardt

For now it seems that by advancing into unknown territories, I entered into my life — Isabelle Eberhardt