Wilfred Thesiger Quotes

1910–2003 England

Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger KBE, DSO, FRAS, FRSL, FRGS (3 June 1910 – 24 August 2003), also called Mubarak bin London (Arabic for "the blessed one of London") was an English explorer and travel writer.

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Random Wilfred Thesiger quote

36 quotes

Once again I experienced the longing to share this life, and to be more than a mere spectator.

The Marsh Arabs (1964)

Now that the Arabs are among the economic masters of the world I fear that many will find unendurable the boredome of their wealth.

Desert, Marsh and Mountain (1979)

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

Desert, Marsh and Mountain (1979)

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

Arabian Sands (1959)

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

The Life Of My Choice (1987)

What use will money be to him in the Sands.

Arabian Sands (1959)

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.

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

Arabian Sands (1959)

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.

The Life Of My Choice (1987)

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

As the plane climbed over the town and swung above the sea I knew how it felt to go into exile.

Arabian Sands (1959)

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

The Life Of My Choice (1987)

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.

The Life Of My Choice (1987)

But we seldom spoke of sex, for starving men dream of food, not women, and our bodies were generally too tired to lust.

Arabian Sands (1959)

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.

Arabian Sands (1959)

God, you must be a couple of pansies.

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.

Arabian Sands (1959)

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.

The Life Of My Choice (1987)

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.

Arabian Sands (1959)

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.

Arabian Sands (1959)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Wilfred Thesiger (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.