Isabelle Eberhardt
Isabelle Eberhardt
Isabelle Eberhardtwas a Swiss explorer and writer. She was educated in Switzerland by her father, who was a tutor, and published short stories under a male pseudonym as a teenager. She took an interest in North Africa and wrote about the area with "remarkable insight and knowledge" despite having only heard about it via correspondence. Upon invitation Eberhardt relocated to Algeria in May 1897, where she dressed as a man and converted to Islam, eventually adopting the name Si Mahmoud...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionExplorer
Date of Birth17 February 1877
One must use the weapons one finds in one's path.
The way I see it, there is no greater spiritual beauty than fanaticism, of a sort so sincere it can only end in martyrdom.
To be alone is to be free, and freedom was the only happiness accessible to my nature.
I think it is impossible for human minds to think of Death as a final, irrevocable end to life.
The savage hatred I feel for crowds is getting worse, natural enemies that they are of imagination and of thought.
Death does not frighten me, but dying obscurely and above all uselessly does.
A nomad I was even when I was very small and would stare at the road, that white spellbinding road headed straight for the unknown ... a nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.
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?
I am not afraid of death, but would not want to die in some obscure or pointless way.
One must never look for happiness: one meets it by the way...
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.
We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.
From every ruin, life springs up again and everything that dies is born again.
I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.