Quotes from Isabelle Eberhardt

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 .

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.

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

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

But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.

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

Tout le grand charme poignant de la vie vient peut-être de la certitude absolue de la mort. Si les choses devaient durer, elles nous sembleraient indignes d'attachement.

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.