Wilfred Thesiger Quotes (55 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

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.

“[re Danakil country] I was among a savage, good-looking people with a dangerous reputation. I was travelling with camels in hot, arid country under testing conditions where, if things went wrong, I could get no help and where men's lives depended on my judgement.”

Wilfred Thesiger

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 94.

“I believe that most men have an inborn desire to hunt and kill and that even today this primitive urge has only been eradicated in a small minority of the human race.”

Wilfred Thesiger

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p.115.

“My first night in camp, as I sat eating sardines out of a tin and watching my Somalis driving the camels up from the river to couch them by the tent, I knew that I would not have been anywhere else for all the money in the world. For a month I travelled in an arid, hostile land. I was alone; there was no one whom I could consult; if I met with trouble from the tribes I could get no help; if I were sick there was no one to doctor me. Men trusted me and obeyed my orders; I was responsible for their safety. I was often tired and thirsty, sometimes frightened and lonely, but I tasted freedom and a way of life from which there could be no recall.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 8.

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.”

Wilfred Thesiger

Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swjcpS6EpV4&feature=youtu.be&t=17m43s. 2001. <br class="br">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.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

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.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

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

“I had yet to learn that no Bedu thinks it shameful to beg, and that often he will look at the gift which he has received and say, ‘Is this all that you are going to give me?’ I was seeing the worst side of their character, and was disillusioned and resentful, and irritated by their assumption of superiority. In consequence I was assertive and unreasonable.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 49.

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

Wilfred Thesiger

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

“Now I had crossed it [the Empty Quarter]. To others my journey would have little importance. It would produce nothing except a rather inaccurate map which no one was ever likely to use. It was a personal experience, and the reward had been a drink of clean, nearly tasteless water. I was content with that.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 138.

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

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

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

“I know that today it sounds unforgivable to have shot seventy lion in five years, but that was fifty years ago and circumstances of that time cannot be judged by those of today.”

Wilfred Thesiger

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 273.

“…I had learnt that the most effective way to spread a story was to tell it to one or two Arabs under a pledge of secrecy.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 255.

“They strolled with me through the streets hand in hand, as is usual with Arab friends, but I was lightly uncomfortable, having re-acquired my inhibitions with my trousers.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 185.

“In the deserts, however arid, I have never felt homesick for green fields and woods in spring, but now that I was in England I longed with an ache that was almost physical to be back in Arabia.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 187.

“There is always trouble if meat is not divided by lot. Someone immediately says that he has been given more than his share, and tries to hand a piece to someone else. Then there is much arguing and swearing by God, with everyone insisting that he has been given too much, and finally a deadlock ensues which can only be settled by casting lots for the meat – as should have been done in the first place. I have never heard a man grumble that he has received less than his share. Such behaviour would be inconceivable to the Bedu, for they are careful never to appear greedy, and quick to notice anyone who is.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 71.

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

Wilfred Thesiger

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

“The rifles with which they fought were all that they accepted from the outside world, the only modern invention which interested them.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 38.

“I could now move without effort from one world to the other as easily as I could change my clothes, but I appreciated that I was in danger of belonging to neither. When I was among my own people, a shadowy figure was always at my side watching them with critical, intolerant eyes.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 257.

“For this was the real desert where differences of race and colour, of wealth and social standing, are almost meaningless; where coverings of pretence are stripped away and basic truths emerge.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 21.

“It is characteristic of Bedu to do things by extremes, to be either wildly generous or unbelievably mean, very patient or almost hysterically excitable, to be incredibly brave or to panic for no apparent reason. Ascetic by nature, they derive satisfaction from the bare simplicity of their lives and scorn the amenities which others would judge essential.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 152.

“I also questioned whether it was right to try to impose on the Sudanese the conventions and values of our utterly alien civilization, and sometimes expressed these doubts in letters to my mother. I could not help feeling that other races were entitled to their own customs and moral standards, however much these might differ from ours.”

Wilfred Thesiger

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 202.

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

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

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

“Looking back on my attitude to the commonly accepted pleasures of life, I can say that I have never set much store by them. I hardly care what I eat, provided it suffices, and I care not at all for wine or spirits. When I was fourteen someone gave me a glass of beer, and I thought it so unpleasant I have never touched beer again. As for cigarettes, I dislike even being in a room where people are smoking. Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap. I have therefore been able to lead the life of my choice with no sense of deprivation. Existence in the desert had a simplicity that I found wholly satisfying; there, everything not a necessity was an encumbrance. It was those three months in the Sahara in 1938 that taught me to appreciate things that most Europeans are able to take for granted: clean water to drink; meat to eat; a warm fire on a cold night; shelter from the rain; above all, tired surrender to sleep.”

Wilfred Thesiger

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 295.

“They [the Middle East Anti Locust Unit] were the golden key that unlocked Arabia for me. To somebody who was interested in desert exploration the Empty Quarter offered the, sort of, ultimate challenge.”

Wilfred Thesiger

BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009mx06, Fri 12 Oct 1979.

“All that is best in the Arabs has come to them from the desert: their deep religious instinct, which has found expression in Islam; their sense of fellowship, which binds them as members of one faith; their pride of race; their generosity and sense of hospitality; their dignity and the regard which they have for the dignity of others as fellow human beings; their humour, their courage and patience, the language which they speak and their passionate love of poetry. But the Arabs are a race which produces its best only under conditions of extreme hardship and deteriorates progressively as living conditions become easier.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 82.

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

Wilfred Thesiger

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

“I knew that I had made my last journey in the Empty Quarter and that a phase in my life was ended. Here in the desert I had found all that I asked; I knew that I should never find it again. But it was not only this personal sorrow that distressed me. I realized that the Bedu with whom I had lived and travelled, and in whose company I had found contentment, were doomed. Some people maintain that they will be better off when they have exchanged the hardship and poverty of the desert for the security of a materialistic world. This I do not believe. I shall always remember how often I was humbled by those illiterate herdsmen who possessed, in so much greater measure than I, generosity and courage, endurance, patience, and light-hearted gallantry. Among no other people have I felt the same sense of personal inferiority.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 310.

“Later he [Evelyn Waugh] asked, at second-hand, if he could accompany me into the Danakil country, where I planned to travel. I refused. Had he come, I suspect only one of us would have returned.”

Wilfred Thesiger

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 92.

“At first glance they [his Bedu companions] seemed to be little better than savages, as primitive as the Danakil, but I was soon disconcerted to discover that, while they were prepared to tolerate me as a source of very welcome revenue, they never doubted my inferiority. They were Muslims and Bedu and I was neither. They had never heard of the English, for all Europeans were known to them simply as Christians, or more probably infidels, and nationality had no meaning to them. They had heard vaguely of the war as a war between the Christians, and of the Aden government as a Christian government. Their world was the desert and they had little if any interest in events that happened outside it.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 36.

“After all, many people feel today that it is morally indefensible to hang a man, even if he has raped and killed a child, but I could not forget how easily we ourselves had taken to killing during the war. Some of the most civilized people I had known had been the most proficient.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 94.

“Strike a Bedu and he will kill you either then or later. It is easy for strangers to give offence without meaning to do so. I once put my hand on the back of bin Kabina’s neck and he turned on me and asked furiously if I took him for a slave. I had no idea that I had done anything wrong.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 148.

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

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

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

“We parted before I went to Abu Dhabi, which I found an Arabian Nightmare, the final disillusionment. For me this book remains a memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent people.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Preface to the 1984 edition
Arabian Sands (1959)

“I believe that day [Ras Tafari's victory parade, Addis Ababa, 3 Nov 1916] implanted in me a life-long craving for barbaric splendour, for savagery and colour and the throb of drums, and that it gave me a lasting veneration for long-established custom and ritual, from which would derive later a deep-seated resentment of Western innovations in other lands, and a distaste for the drab uniformity of the modern world.”

Wilfred Thesiger

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 56.

“It is not hunger nor thirst that frightens the Bedu; they maintain that riding they can survive in cold weather for seven days without food or water. It is the possible collapse of their camels which haunts them. If this happens, death is certain.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 103.

“They were Bedu, and these empty spaces where there was neither shade nor shelter were their homelands. Any of them could have worked in the gardens around Salala; all of them would have scorned this easier life of lesser men. Among the Bedu only the broken are stranded among the cultivations on the desert’s shore.”

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

Source: Arabian Sands (1959), p. 85.

“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 book Arabian Sands

Prologue. p. 1.
Arabian Sands (1959)

“I think the harder the life, the finer the type, yes, and I certainly felt this about the Bedu. When I went there, I felt that the difficulty was going to be living up physically to the hardships of their life. But, on the contrary, it was the difficulty of meeting their high standards: their generosity, their patience, their loyalty, their courage and all these things. And they had a quality of nobility.”

Wilfred Thesiger

Answer to “Do you think that hardship and, indeed, suffering bring nobility?”
Interview with Sir David Attenborough first broadcast on Channel 4 in August 1994.
Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, edited by Chris Morton and Philip Grover (2010), p. 82.

“In July 1969 I happened to be in Kenya, on the shore of Lake Rudolf, when I heard with incredulity from a naked Turkana fisherman that the 'Wazungu' as he called Europeans, including Americans - had landed on the moon. He had heard the news at a distant mission station. To him this achievement, being incomprehensible, was without significance; it filled me, however, with a sense of desecration, and of despair at the deadly technical ingenuity of modern man. Even as a boy I recognized that motor transport and aeroplanes must increasingly shrink the world and irrevocably destroy its fascinating diversity. My forebodings have been amply fulfilled.”

Wilfred Thesiger

Source: The Life Of My Choice (1987), p. 443.

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

Wilfred Thesiger

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