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Gertrude Bell Quotes

There is nothing more difficult to measure than the value of visible emotion.

There is nothing more difficult to measure than the value of visible emotion.

Gertrude Bell
Emotion, Difficult, Visible
Gertrude Bell (2014). “Persian Pictures: From the Mountains to the Sea”, p.42, I.B.Tauris

To wake in that desert dawn was like waking in the heart of an opal. ... See the desert on a fine morning and die - if you can!

Gertrude Bell
Morning, Heart, Dawn
Gertrude Bell (2012). “The Desert and the Sown: Travels in Palestine and Syria”, p.64, Courier Corporation

It's so nice to be a spoke in the wheel, one that helps to turn, not one that hinders.

Gertrude Bell
Nice, Wheels, Helping
Gertrude Bell (2014). “The Letters of Gertrude Bell”, p.1761, eStar Books

All the earth is seamed with roads, and all the sea is furrowed with the tracks of ships, and over all the roads and all the waters a continuous stream of people passes up and down - traveling, as they say, for their pleasure. What is it, I wonder, that they go out to see?

Gertrude Bell
Travel, Sea, People
Gertrude Lowthian Bell (1894). “Safar Nameh: Persian Pictures”

I will have no locked cupboards in my life.

Gertrude Bell
Cupboards, Locked

The most degrading of human passions is the fear of death. It tears away the restraints and the conventions which alone make social life possible to man; it reveals the brute in him which underlies them all. In the desperate hand-to-hand struggle for life there is no element of nobility. He who is engaged upon it throws aside honor, he throws aside self-respect, he throws aside all that would make victory worth having - he asks for nothing but bare life.

Gertrude Bell
Death, Struggle, Passion

We as outsiders can't differentiate between Sunni and Shi'ah, but leave it to them and they'll get over the difficulty by some kind of hanky panky, just as the Turks did, and for the present it's the only way of getting over it. I don't for a moment doubt that the final authority must be in the hands of the Sunnis, in spite of their numerical inferiority; otherwise you will have a mujtahid-run, theocratic state, which is the very devil.

Gertrude Bell
Running, Hands, Doubt

Until quite recently I've been wholly cut off from [the Shias] because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don't permit me to veil Nor is it any good trying to make friends through the women - if they were allowed to see me they would veil before me as if I were a man. So you see I appear to be too female for one sex and too male for the other.

Gertrude Bell
Sex, Cutting, Men

...the holy men sat in an atmosphere reeking of antiquity, so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it -nor can they.

Gertrude Bell
Life, Men, Dust

I have fallen a hopeless victim to the Turk; he is the most charming of mortals.

Gertrude Bell
Europe, Hopeless, Charming

... at times they are good and quiet company, the dead; they will not interrupt your musings, but when they speak, whether they be Jews or Turks or heathens, they will speak in a tongue all can understand. there are even countries where the moving, breathing people are less intelligible, dwell in a world further apart form you, than that silent population under the earth.

Gertrude Bell
Country, Moving, Breathing
Gertrude Bell (2014). “Persian Pictures: From the Mountains to the Sea”, p.147, I.B.Tauris

I've been busy with a long memorandum about the whole of our central Arabian relations, which I've just finished. It will now go to all the High and Mighty in every part. One can't do much more than sit and record if one is of my sex, devil take it; one can get the things recorded in the right way and that means, I hope, that unconsciously people will judge events as you think they ought to be judged. But it's small change for doing things, very small change I feel at times.

Gertrude Bell
Sex, Mean, Thinking

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