An opinion can be argued with; a conviction is best shot. The logical end of a war of creeds is the final destruction of one, and Salammbo is the classical text-book instance.
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.
Isn’t it true that the fault of birth rests somewhat on the child? I believe it’s we who led our parents on to bear us, and it’s our unborn children who make our flesh itch.
The Beduin of the desert, born and grown up in it, had embraced with all his sour this nakedness too harsh for volunteers, for the reason, felt but inarticulate, that there he found himself indubitably free.
The beginning and ending of the secret of handling Arabs is unremitting study of them.
The desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.
The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.
He was old and wise, which meant tired and disappointed...
He feared his maturity as it grew upon him with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.
I haven’t got a heart: only the former site of one, with a monument there to say that it has been removed and the area it occupied turned into a public garden, in pursuance of the slum-clearance scheme.
Misery, anger, indignation, discomfort-those conditions produce literature. Contentment-never. So there you are.
To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
As long as the arabs fight tribe against tribe, so long will they be a little people, a silly people, greedy, barbarous and cruel.
Dream your dreams with open eyes and make them come true.
We lived always in the stretch or sag of nerves, either on the crest or in the trough of waves of feeling.
The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God.
A skittish motorbike with a touch of blood in it is better than all the riding animals on earth, because of its logical extension of our faculties, and the hint, the provocation, to excess conferred by its honeyed untiring smoothness.
There is an ideal standard somewhere and only that matters and I cannot find it. Hence the aimlessness.
The literature of disease is more interesting to me than all the healthy books.
I wrote my will across the sky, in stars.
The greatest commander is he whose intuitions most nearly happen.