Wilfred Thesiger Quotes

Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger , also called Mubarak bin London was an English explorer and travel writer.

Thesiger is best known for his travel books Arabian Sands , on his foot and camel crossing of the Empty Quarter of Arabia, and The Marsh Arabs , on his time living in the marshes of Iraq with the Marsh Arabs. He donated his collection of 38,000 travel photographs to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

✵ 3. June 1910 – 24. August 2003
Wilfred Thesiger photo

Works

Arabian Sands
Arabian Sands
Wilfred Thesiger
Wilfred Thesiger: 55   quotes 0   likes

Famous Wilfred Thesiger Quotes

Wilfred Thesiger Quotes about life

Wilfred Thesiger Quotes about men

“The biggest misfortune in human history is the invention of the combustion engine. Cars and airplanes diminish the world, rob it of all its diversity. Young men who meet me want to know how they could do what I've done. But all they can be is tourists now.”

Book Report by David Streitfeld https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1999/06/06/book-report/664d575b-8615-4d17-9275-dd7eb11de8bd/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.213c896c1ac0.  The Washington Post. 6 June 1999.

Wilfred Thesiger: Trending quotes

“The harder the life the finer the type and there’s no doubt about that; the easier you make life the lower goes your standards.”

Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swjcpS6EpV4&feature=youtu.be&t=17m43s. 2001.
Variant: I think the harder the life, the finer the type

“Regretfully, however, I realize that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame.”

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 68.
Context: Yet I wondered fancifully if he had seen more clearly than they did, had sensed the threat which my presence implied – the approaching disintegration of his society and the destruction of his beliefs. Here especially it seemed that the evil that comes with sudden change would far outweigh the good.  While I was with the Arabs I wished only to live as they lived and, now that I have left them, I would gladly think that nothing in their lives was altered by my coming.  Regretfully, however, I realize that the maps I made helped others, with more material aims, to visit and corrupt a people whose spirit once lit the desert like a flame.

“No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.”

Prologue. p. 1.
Arabian Sands (1959)
Context: A cloud gathers, the rain falls, men live; the cloud disperses without rain, and men and animals die. In the deserts of southern Arabia there is no rhythm of the seasons, no rise and fall of sap, but empty wastes where only the changing temperature marks the passage of the years. It is a bitter, desiccated land which knows nothing of gentleness or ease….. No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match.

Wilfred Thesiger Quotes

“Personally, I would forgo any other comfort to drink clean water.”

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 153.

“I might have been homosexual if I was born in a different age but as it was I remained asexual.”

Stewart, Rory (2007). Arabian Sands (Introduction). London: Penguin Classics. p. xii. ISBN 9780141442075

“I had felt the lure of the unexplored, the compulsion to go where others had not been.”

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 95.

“I craved for the past, resented the present, and dreaded the future.”

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 20.

“God, you must be a couple of pansies.”

Newby, Eric (1958). A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Secker & Warburg.
The final sentence of the book as Thesiger watches Newby and Hugh Carless inflate their air beds

“What use will money be to him in the Sands.”

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 122.

“To me it is always the people rather than the places that matter.”

Source: Desert, Marsh and Mountain (1979), p. 122.

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