Pierre Loti Quotes

Today the traveller on the Nile enters a wonderland at whose gates rise the colossal pyramids of which he has had visions perhaps from earliest childhood.

To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist.

When we find something new at Giza, we announce it to the world. The Sphinx and the Pyramids are world treasures. We are the guardian's of these treasures, but they belong to the world.

Many parts of the granite statues were found, the most important of which had features close to Ramses II. The statue needs some restoration and weighs between four and five tons.

Commenced operations in the Valley of the Kings.

Egypt, the Egypt of antiquity, at a later time, exercised a mysterious fascination over me. I recognized a picture of it immediately, without hesitation and astonishment, in an illustrated magazine.

I have no interest in going to Egypt and seeing the pyramids. I'm just not that kind of dude.

The tap'ring pyramid, the Egyptian's pride, And wonder of the world, whose spiky top Has wounded the thick cloud.

President Obama invited John McCain to the White House to give his opinion on Egypt, specifically what it's like to be a mummy.

(Egypt) is a great place for contrasts: splendid things gleam in the dust.

What about King Tut’s tomb?” I protested. “That boy king?” Zia rolled her eyes. “Boring. You should see some of the good tombs.

The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped.

Why do I live in the desert? Because the desert is the *locus Dei*.

I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs, and gleams.

A forest is mystery but the desert is truth. Life pared to the bone.

There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature herself, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth of the valley.

... the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

When you see the Escalades and the Hummers driving down the street, at least in Los Angeles, this dry, flat desert with shopping malls, when you see someone driving one of those through this you're like, 'You are definitely part of the problem.'

Egypt is the gift of the Nile.

The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others.

When you're in the desert, you look into infinity.... It makes you feel terribly small, and also in a strange way, quite big.

The alchemist of the West has turned stone into glass But my alchemy has transmuted glass into flint Pharaohs of today have stalked me in vain

You can't change the desert. You can only take the fastest course through it. Wishing it's an oasis won't make it so.

We passed hieroglyphic scrolls, gold jewelry, sarcophagi, statues of pharaohs, and huge chunks of limestone. Why would someone display a rock? Aren't there enough of those in the world?