“Mohammedanism in its institution, and for many centuries after its birth, was eminently a rationalistic creed; and it was through reason as well as faith that it first achieved its spiritual triumphs.”

Stressing the historical partnership of reason and faith in Islamic intellectual life · Essay, The Future of Islam, 1882

• Faith
• Truth

“Her reformation is indeed already begun, and may be gradually carried to its full results, by no violent means, and in a progressive, not a reactionary spirit.”

Expressing confidence in gradual reform achieved without violence · Essay, The Future of Islam, 1882

• Faith
• Hope

“There is no sign as yet that it has ceased to be a living faith.”

Emphasising religion as an active force in people's lives rather than a historical remnant · Essay, The Future of Islam, 1882

• Faith
• Time

“To doubt the sincerity and even, in a certain sense, the sanctity of such persons, would be to doubt all religion.”

Defending the sincerity of religious devotion across cultural boundaries · Essay, The Future of Islam, 1882

• Faith
• Truth

“It is only by a knowledge of the elements of which Islam is made up that we can guess its future, and these are less generally known than they should be.”

Arguing that prediction requires knowledge of a culture's internal complexity · Essay, The Future of Islam, 1882

• Time
• Truth

“I will own, too, to having come away with more than a gratified curiosity, and to having found new worlds of thought and life in an atmosphere I had fancied to be only of decay.”

Acknowledging how experience overturned his preconceptions and opened unfamiliar worlds of thought · Essay, The Future of Islam, 1882

• Hope
• Truth

“Jeddah then realized all my hopes and gratified nearly all my curiosities.”

Recalling how direct encounter with Jeddah fulfilled his intellectual expectations · Essay, The Future of Islam, 1882

• Hope
• Truth

“The country districts are still quite untouched by our Western ugliness.”

Expressing his resistance to the aesthetic effects of European modernisation · Diary, 7 November 1900

• Beauty
• Nature

“The appearance of plenty and happiness does one good after the squalor of Europe.”

Contrasting the vitality he perceived in Egypt with his dissatisfaction with Europe · Diary, 7 November 1900

• Beauty
• Joy

“There are few things more beautiful than the Delta at this time of year, or where one sees more life from a railway carriage window.”

Recording his delight in the abundance and animation of the Egyptian landscape · Diary, 7 November 1900

• Beauty
• Joy
• Nature

“It needs Oriental experience to understand this.”

Insisting that direct experience could overturn assumptions formed solely in Europe · Letter quoted in diary, 29 January 1900

• Truth

“The oak tree does not monopolize the forest, nor are the flowers which grow there trash.”

Using the diversity of a forest to challenge doctrines based on domination by the strongest · Letter quoted in diary, 29 January 1900

• Beauty
• Nature
• Truth

“The law of the strongest, as we see it in Modern Civilization, is not the law of Nature, only the law of human nature, which is a very different thing.”

Distinguishing human systems of domination from the workings of the natural world · Letter quoted in diary, 29 January 1900

• Nature
• Truth

“If it is true that your worship of Force is to be the creed of the future, and very likely it will be so, it is only another proof of the innate vulgarity of man.”

Treating the glorification of power as evidence of human coarseness rather than strength · Letter quoted in diary, 29 January 1900

• Despair
• Truth

“That, however, is no reason for adoring as you say you do Force even tempered by Fraud. There is nothing in the smallest degree admirable in either.”

Rejecting power and deception even while professing little faith in human progress · Letter quoted in diary, 29 January 1900

• Truth

“I am not a disciple of Tolstoy. He believes in the possibility of improvement, in moral progress, and in a far away Christian civilization. I do not.”

Distancing himself from Tolstoy's faith in humanity's moral progress · Letter quoted in diary, 29 January 1900

• Despair
• Faith
• Truth

“The thing that seemed to me supremely in need of being shown ridiculous was the worship of humanity in any form.”

Rejecting idealised conceptions of humanity with characteristic pessimism · Letter quoted in diary, 29 January 1900

• Despair
• Truth

“War will be unpopular enough in England soon if it goes on as at present, and there will be a chance then for the weak nations to remain unmolested.”

Hoping military failure might diminish enthusiasm for imperial warfare · Diary, 17 December 1899

• Hope
• War

“Every honest man, English or not, ought to rejoice.”

Putting his conception of justice above national allegiance during the Boer War · Diary, 17 December 1899

• Truth
• War

“The Boers are making a splendid fight for their freedom, and are winning all along the line.”

Reflecting his outspoken sympathy for peoples resisting imperial power · Diary, 17 December 1899

• Freedom
• War

“War, when it is a war of aggression, as they all admit that this is, is mere murder, and though it is humiliating to make peace on a defeat, it can't be surely right to go on.”

Condemning aggressive warfare in uncompromising moral terms · Diary, 17 December 1899

• Truth
• War

“In Egypt, where there are no game laws and no birdsnesting, I never fire a gun.”

Contrasting his conduct in Egypt with his rationale for shooting in England · Diary, 1 September 1899

• Nature

“My logic about shooting here in England is, that it is the only way of preventing the destruction of wild animals.”

Explaining the paradox by which he justified sporting estates as refuges for wildlife · Diary, 1 September 1899

• Nature
• Truth

“Beauty is the natural gift, to desert man and desert beast, only of peninsular Arabia.”

A traveller's highly personal judgement on the distinctive beauty he associated with Arabia · Diary, Siwah journey, February 1897

• Beauty
• Nature