Gertrude Bell Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

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

Gertrude Bell
I feel at times like the Creator about the middle of the week. He must have wondered what it was going to be like, as I do.

Gertrude Bell
It is almost impossible to believe that a few years ago the human race was more or less governed by reason and considered consequences, before it did things.... At the back of my mind I have a feeling that we people of the war can never return to complete sanity. The shock has been too great; we're unbalanced.

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

Gertrude Bell
When people talk of our muddling through it throws me into a passion. Muddle through! why yes so we do –wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed.

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

Gertrude Bell
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 for to see?

Gertrude Bell
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
Until quite recently I've been wholly cut off from them [the Shias] because their tenets forbid them to look upon an unveiled woman and my tenets don't permit me to veil.

Gertrude Bell
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
The world of adventure and of enterprise, dark with hurrying storms, glittering in raw sunlight, an unanswered question and unanswerable doubt hidden in the fold of every hill.
On travel in the desert

Gertrude Bell
I wonder why you care so much about me — no, I don't wonder. I only accept it as the thing at the back of all one's life that makes everything bearable and possible. But it is a singular thing to be sure.

Gertrude Bell