I will only ever be drawn to people who suffer from that special and fertile anguish called self-doubt, or the thirst for the ideal, and desire for the soul's mystical fire. Self-satisfaction because of some material accomplishment will never be for me. The truly great are those who quest for better spiritual selves.

Isabelle Eberhardt

Categorized in : Spiritual Fire Self

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

contentment life travel

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

liberty freedom home

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

Isabelle Eberhardt

spiritual letting-go character

Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures. ... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies. ... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with discontented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable.

Isabelle Eberhardt

giving-up men lying

The cowardly belief that a person must stay in one place is too reminiscent of the unquestioning resignation of animals, beasts of burden stupefied by servitude and yet always willing to accept the slipping on of the harness. There are limits to every domain, and laws to govern every organized power. But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the non-existent horizon, and her empire is an intangible one, for her domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.

Isabelle Eberhardt

horizon law animal

But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.

Isabelle Eberhardt

vagrants empires horizon

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

Isabelle Eberhardt

inner-peace happiness looks

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

Isabelle Eberhardt

advancing territory seems

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

Isabelle Eberhardt

detached feels world

A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is a deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up the symbolic stick and bundle and get out.

Isabelle Eberhardt

offering essence giving

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

Isabelle Eberhardt

uncharted-waters inspire travel

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

Isabelle Eberhardt

hatred imagination enemy

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

beautiful past thinking

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.

Isabelle Eberhardt

uncharted white travel

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

poor

I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

Isabelle Eberhardt

elsewhere sun travel

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

Isabelle Eberhardt

weapons use path

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

Isabelle Eberhardt

ruins rebirth spring

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

sincere spiritual way

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

Isabelle Eberhardt

mind death thinking