My Journey to Lhasa Quotes

“But the “hut” turnedout to be a passage between two great rocks. At last utterexhaustion compelled us to rest. The site was not in the leastfit for camping; the exceedingly narrow trail skirted a stony,natural wall, and, on the other side, ended perpendicularly.We lay down on a rocky mattress whose roughness we unpleas-antly felt through our clothes and endeavoured to remembereven in our sleep that we were perched on the edge of a preci-pice whose depth was unfathomable in the night. In such wise we spent the second happy night of our wonder-ful adventure. Day had not yet broken when Yongden and1 loaded our burdens on our backs and continued the trampthrough the forest. More than twenty-four hours had nowelapsed since we had eaten and drunk. We had not yet becomeaccustomed to prolonged fasts, and this first one was hard tobear.”
― Alexandra David-Néel, My Journey to Lhasa: The Classic Story of the Only Western Woman Who Succeeded in Entering the Forbidden City

“If heaven is the Lord's, the earth is the inheritance of man and consequently any honest traveller has the right to walk as he chooses, all over that globe which is his.

What I heard was the thousand-year-old echo of thoughts which are re-thought over and over again in the East and which, nowadays, appear to have fixed their stronghold in the majestic heights of Thibet.

I am one of the Genghis Khan race who, by mistake, and perhaps for her sins, was born in the Occident. So I was once told by a lama.

I saw a wolf passing near us. It trotted by with the busy, yet calm gait of a serious gentleman going to attend to some affair of importance.

The true Blissful Paradise which, being nowhere and everywhere, lies in the mind of each one of us.

How happy I was to be there. en route for the mystery of these unexplored heights, alone in the great silence, "tasting the sweets of solitude and tranquility", as a passage of the Buddhist Scripture has it.

Human credulity, be it in the East or in the West, has no limits. In India, the Brahmins have for centuries kept their countrymen to the opinion that offering presents to those belonging to their caste and feeding them, was a highly meritorious religious work.

As a rule, the place where grain is ground is the cleanest in a Thibetan house.

Asiatics do not feel, as we do, the need of privacy and silence in sleep.”
― Alexandra David-Néel, My Journey to Lhasa: The Personal Story of the Only White Woman Who Succeeded in Entering the Forbidden City

“Ever since I was five years old,” David-Néel wrote in My Journey to Lhasa, “I wished to move out of the narrow limits in which, like all children of my age, I was then kept. I craved to go beyond the garden gate, to follow the road that passed it by, and to set out for the Unknown. But strangely enough, this ‘Unknown’ fancied by my baby mind always turned out to be a solitary spot where I could sit alone, with no one near.”
― Alexandra David-Néel, My Journey to Lhasa: The Classic Story of the Only Western Woman Who Succeeded in Entering the Forbidden City