Humour Quotes - page 8
All that is best in the Arabs has come to them from the desert: their deep religious instinct, which has found expression in Islam; their sense of fellowship, which binds them as members of one faith; their pride of race; their generosity and sense of hospitality; their dignity and the regard which they have for the dignity of others as fellow human beings; their humour, their courage and patience, the language which they speak and their passionate love of poetry. But the Arabs are a race which produces its best only under conditions of extreme hardship and deteriorates progressively as living conditions become easier.
Wilfred Thesiger
2915. Suffer a Friend to reprove thee, and thank him heartily for it : 'Tis a Happiness for a Man that he can be reproved when he does amiss, and be recalled when he runs wrong. Princes are deprived of that Benefit : for they converse familiarly but with very few Persons, and those make it their only Business to humour them.
Thomas Fuller (writer)
We form at La Faucille now a little colony where concord and happiness reign, and have not even for enemies the bears of the country... We are situated in a very movable manner, however, on one of the mountains of the Jura, where the inn is the most remarkable building. For I must tell you that we enjoy the company of an unaccountable old man of sixty, who resembles poor Father Colombert as if it were he himself. He is of the ancient nobility. He held the grade of General under the Restoration, having had possessions, which he has lost by the changes. He consoles himself now by carrying all his fortune. With him, a much rarer lot it consists in good humour and strength and philosophy. I have never seen a more excellent man. He is here to search for plants and stones.
Théodore Rousseau
These [RAF] airmen were my fellow countrymen, and I was proud to be of their race. I knew the essential decency which was the bedrock of their character, their humour, stubbornness, and self-reliance. I knew that if called upon they could adapt themselves to any kind of life, in the desert, in the jungle, in mountains or on the sea, and that in many respects no race in the world was their equal. But the things that interested them bored me. They belonged to an age of machines; they were fascinated by cars and aeroplanes, and found their relaxation in the cinema and the wireless. I knew that I stood apart from them and would never find contentment among them, whereas I could find it among the Bedu, although I should never be one of them.
Wilfred Thesiger
