Wilfred Thesiger: Trending quotes (page 3)

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

God

“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.

Life , People , World , Travel

“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.

Travel , Country

“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.

War , World

“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.

War , People , Feeling , Forgetting

“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.

Idea

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

Wilfred Thesiger book Arabian Sands

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

Money

“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)

People , Books , Memory , Past

“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.

Life , World , Victory

“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.

Death , Hunger , Food , Water

“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.

Life , Men

“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)

Season , Nature , Animals , Men

“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.

Courage , Life , Thinking , Patience

“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.

Despair , Boy , Distant , Sense

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

Wilfred Thesiger

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

People