Isabelle Eberhardt Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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