Isabelle Eberhardt Quotes

#1. I think it is impossible for human minds to think of Death as a final, irrevocable end to life.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#2. Life on the open road is liberty ... to be alone, to have few needs, to be unknown, everywhere a foreigner and at home, and to walk grandly and solitarily in conquest of the world.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#3. Death does not frighten me, but dying obscurely and above all uselessly does.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#4. We are, all of us, poor wretches, and those who prefer not to understand this are even worse off than the rest of us.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#5. For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#6. From every ruin, life springs up again and everything that dies is born again.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#7. Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#8. The way I see it, there is no greater spiritual beauty than fanaticism, of a sort so sincere it can only end in martyrdom.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#9. The farther behind I leave the past, the closer I am to forging my own character.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#10. To be alone is to be free, and freedom was the only happiness accessible to my nature.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#11. For now it seems that by advancing into unknown territories, I entered into my life

Isabelle Eberhardt

#12. The savage hatred I feel for crowds is getting worse, natural enemies that they are of imagination and of thought.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#13. A nomad I will remain for life,
in love with distant and uncharted places.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#14. 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?

Isabelle Eberhardt

#15. Crime, particularly among the poor and downtrodden, is often a last gesture of liberty.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#16. I study life by being close to it, this "native life" about which so little is known, and which is so disfigured by the descriptions of those who, not knowing it, insist on describing it anyway.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#17. One must use the weapons one finds in one's path.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#18. I feel alone, free, and detached from everything in the world, and I'm happy.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#19. One must never look for happiness: one meets it by the way.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#20. I am not afraid of death, but would not want to die in some obscure or pointless way.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#21. No prayers, no medicines, merely the ineffable happiness of dying.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#22. 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.

Isabelle Eberhardt

#23. While to live in the past and think of what was good and beautiful about it amounts to a sort of seasoning of the present, the perennial wait for tomorrow is bound to result in chronic discontent that poisons one's entire outlook.

Isabelle Eberhardt