Top 70 Tahir Shah Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.”

— Tahir Shah

2. “To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own path.”

— Tahir Shah

3. “Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.”

— Tahir Shah

4. “I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand.”

— Tahir Shah

5. “Through bitter experience I have learned that it is best to promise little and then to reward hard work with generosity.”

— Tahir Shah

6. “Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spent.”

— Tahir Shah

7. “A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.”

— Tahir Shah

8. “There is nothing like a train journey for reflection.”

— Tahir Shah

9. “My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.”

— Tahir Shah

10. “Two reeds drink from the same stream. One is hollow, the other is sugarcane. – MOROCCAN PROVERB.”

— Tahir Shah

11. “For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.”

— Tahir Shah

12. “Calcutta’s the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.”

— Tahir Shah

13. “The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.”

— Tahir Shah

14. “A journey, I reflected, is of no merit unless it has tested you.”

— Tahir Shah

15. “In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that i will come to no harm.”

— Tahir Shah

16. “As a travel writer I’ve specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader’s hair stick on end.”

— Tahir Shah

17. “Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.”

— Tahir Shah

18. “Do not stand in a place of danger trusting in miracles.”

— Tahir Shah

19. “On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust.”

— Tahir Shah

20. “The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.”

— Tahir Shah

21. “The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness, and it would consume you without hesitation.”

— Tahir Shah

22. “Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.”

— Tahir Shah

23. “I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas.”

— Tahir Shah

24. “On a harsh expedition, there’s no space for anyone who does not intend to finish.”

— Tahir Shah

25. “Stories are not like the real world; they aren’t held back by what we know is false or true. What’s important is how a story makes you feel inside.”

— Tahir Shah

26. “Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.”

— Tahir Shah

27. “It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.”

— Tahir Shah

28. “To be selfless, you would give charity anonymously, walj softly on the earth, and look out for others-even total strangers-before you look out for yourself. For the Arab mind, the self is an obstacle, an impediment, in humanity’s quest foe real progress.”

— Tahir Shah

29. “There’s nothing quite like a good quest for getting your blood pumping.”

— Tahir Shah

30. “There’s nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.”

— Tahir Shah

31. “During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.”

— Tahir Shah

32. “I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.”

— Tahir Shah

33. “The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest.”

— Tahir Shah

34. “Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does.”

— Tahir Shah

35. “There comes a stage at which a man would rather die cleanly by a bullet than by the unknown terror of the phantom in the forest.”

— Tahir Shah

36. “The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.”

— Tahir Shah

37. “Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.”

— Tahir Shah

38. “Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.”

— Tahir Shah

39. “Usually, there is nothing more pleasing that returning to a place where you have endured hardship.”

— Tahir Shah

40. “In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell.”

— Tahir Shah

41. “Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones.”

— Tahir Shah

42. “Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It’s just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.”

— Tahir Shah

43. “The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.”

— Tahir Shah

44. “For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news – as you learn how much more of it’s been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my home.”

— Tahir Shah

45. “Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.”

— Tahir Shah

46. “For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.”

— Tahir Shah

47. “A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it.”

— Tahir Shah

48. “There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone.”

— Tahir Shah

49. “Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It’s inside us all, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged. But it’s in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a touch-paper alight.”

— Tahir Shah

50. “The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study’s sake. There’s no right or wrong, no pass or fail.”

— Tahir Shah