85 Desert Quotes to Make You Wonder if Life is Like a Desert

Life is like a desert. You only regret the oasis you let pass.

These desert quotes show what life is like traveling through the desert.

You may pass by blessings because you’re chasing a mirage.

You hit a stretch in your life where there’s nothing but desert. Then you remember all the oases you let pass.

Your blessings are a test. Being grateful for even the smallest blessings shows that you deserve more. For example, imagine you have to choose one person to give something valuable to.

Who would you choose? Would you choose the grateful or the selfish person?

You must be happy with a little. Then you will be given more.

Desert Life Quotes 

“Maybe God created the desert so that man could appreciate the date trees”

∼Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“In the empire of desert, water is the king and shadow is the queen.”
∼Mehmet Murat ildan

“Like water in the desert is wisdom to the soul.”
∼Edward Counsel

“The desert is the theater of the human struggle of searching for God.”
∼Jan Majernik

“The desert does not mean the absence of men, it means the presence of God.”
∼Carlo Carreto

“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…”

∼Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“Water, water, water….There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, water to sand, insuring that wide free open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.”

∼Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

“The desert and the ocean are realms of desolation on the surface.

The desert is a place of bones, where the innards are turned out, to desiccate into dust.

The ocean is a place of skin, rich outer membranes hiding thick juicy insides, laden with the soup of being.

Inside out and outside in. These are worlds of things that implode or explode, and the only catalyst that determines the direction of eco-movement is the balance of water.

Both worlds are deceptive, dangerous. Both, seething with hidden life.

The only veil that stands between perception of what is underneath the desolate surface is your courage.

Dare to breach the surface and sink.”

∼Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“I have this personal affinity for the desert. I am fascinated by the desert. I love it.”
∼Erika Slezak

“There is nothing in the desert and no man needs nothing.”
∼David

“The immense desert, empty as a bird’s wing, inspired him with promise.”
∼Mike Bond

“The desert surrounds your every step and you walk forever a thirsty man.”
∼Christopher Pike

“In the desert, the line between life and death is sharp and quick.”
∼Brian Herbert

“The desert shatters the soul’s arrogance and leaves body and soul crying out in thirst and hunger. In the desert we trust God or die.”

∼Dan B. Allender

“What draws us into the desert is the search for something intimate in the remote.”

∼Edward Abbey

“Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness of night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling wonder, made death a thing of no great importance. You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold.”

∼Fante J

“What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.”
∼Antoine de Saint

“Being in the desert was brilliant and it was hard.”
∼Toni Collette

“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body.”
∼Jean Baudrillard

“The desert, when the sun comes up. I couldn’t tell where heaven stopped and the Earth began.”
∼Tom Hanks

“Nothing the desert produces expresses it better than the unhappy growth of the tree yuccas.”
∼Mary Hunter Austin

“If the desert allows the trees to proliferate, the desert shall disappear! Therefore the desert has no choice but to be the enemy of the trees!”

∼Mehmet Murat ildan

“That undefined and mingled hum, Voice of the desert never dumb!”
∼James Hogg

“A desert is a place without expectation.”
∼Nadine Gordimer

“Polish comes from the cities; wisdom from the desert.”
∼Frank Herbert

“Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find the means frightening.”
∼Floriano Martins

“The vast sage desert undulates with almost imperceptible tides like the oceans.”
∼Frank Waters

“This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought.”
∼T. E. Lawrence

“We have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. We drown in the thick sweetness of our sensual excess, and our shameless opulence, while our discontent souls suffocate in the arid wasteland of spiritual deprivation.”

∼Anthon St. Maarten

“God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden…
The best gift of the desert is God’s presence… The protective love of the Shepherd gives me courage to face the interior journey.”

∼Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

“Time has a different meaning for me, and these events that seem so monumental in the moment will one day be nothing more than a line in a scroll. These humans are but letters to be inked into history. A hundred years from now, I will be free. I will have forgotten their names and faces, and the struggles they have will not matter. Time has a way of burying things, shifting like the desert and swallowing entire civilizations, erasing them from map and memory. Always, in the end, everything returns to dust.”

∼Jessica Khoury, The Forbidden Wish

“I had to clear up my messy life. By letting go of the debris and filth, I have come to a deeper, more soulful beauty and clarity like an oasis in the desert. From that place of clarity, a vision of what I could have, what I could do, who I could be has emerged if I allow my heart to become a place of compassion, acceptance and forgiveness.”

∼Sharon E. Rainey, Making a Pearl from the Grit of Life

“But in the desert, in the pure clean atmosphere, in the silence – there you can find yourself. And unless you begin to know yourself, how can you even begin to search for God?”

∼Father Dioscuros

“The vastness of the desert frightened her. Everything looked too far away, even the couldless sky. There was nowhere you could hide in such emptiness.”

∼James Carlos Blake, The Rules of Wolfe

“Pale sky, white land; like somewhere past the end of the world”
∼Rinsai Rossetti

“Where is my oasis? Too far from
here for me to crawl with these
dead legs, refusing to co-operate
Hands and fingers clawing uselessly
through the grains of sand…”

∼Kiera Woodhull, Chaos of the Mind

“No doubt you are wondering what you will find, out there.’ The Commandant said it for me.
‘Well, it would be useless for me to try and tell you. The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it…”

∼Robert Edison Fulton Jr., One Man Caravan

“This sweet virginal primitive land will metaphorically breathe a sigh of relief –like a whisper of wind–when we are all and finally gone and the place and its creations can return to their ancient procedures unobserved and undisturbed by the busy, anxious, brooding consciousness of man.”

∼Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

“I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred ‘great books’ – and one brave deed is worth a thousand.”

∼Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

“If people leave you, they may be right or wrong
If you quit happiness, you’re definitely wrong”

∼Vineet Raj Kapoor

“If you spend enough time in the desert, you will hear it speak.”

∼Nnedi Okorafor, Who Fears Death

“Your will is free means: it was free when it wanted the desert, it is free since it can choose the path that leads to crossing the desert, it is free since it can choose the pace, but it is also unfree since you must go through the desert, unfree since every path in labyrinthine manner touches every foot of the desert’s surface.”

∼Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks

“Even in the most barren desert one would still feel one’s heart beating.”

∼Marty Rubin

“The magic of the desert is hard to define. Why does the sight of a landscape of empty sand, rocks, slab and rubble stir the spirits more than a view of lush green fields and woods? Why does the lifeless play of light, colour and distance have such an invigorating, fascinating and elating effect? Perhaps because no limitations are imposed by other forms of life; perhaps because the mind of the beholder is presented with a fata morgana of unlimited freedom. And on such far horizons the outline of a mountain draws the eye like an island in the endless ocean.”

∼Henno Martin, The Sheltering Desert

“I didn’t know where I was going. My life was a hard and difficult desert. I was wandering aimlessly. I was drifting like a crazy man and wandering from place to place. I would wake up in the morning in one city and sleep in the night in another city. What was the meaning of my life? Nothing! What was the meaning of happiness? I did not know!

I was a nomad. I was a wanderer. I was a drifter. Why was I drifting? Yes, I wish I knew why? I was not aware of the reason myself. Why was I drifting?

And then one day I met you. You came to my life like the clouds to a parched desert! For a while, I discovered peace! I discovered that I too had a heart! I began to smile for the first time in life!”

∼Avijeet Das

“Deserts are full of sand and winds are full of air,
both are full of something but both look quite empty
and when they get to pair
it’s easy to see they are almighty.”

∼Alain Bremond-Torrent, Running is flying intermittently

“All you have to do is contemplate a simple grain of sand, and you will see in it all the marvels of creation.”

∼Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“Water is a desert’s gold.”

∼Matshona Dhliwayo

“The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across the desert sky.”

∼Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

“Across the desolation lay a supreme indifference, the casualness of night and another day, and yet the secret intimacy of those hills, their silent consoling wonder, made death a thing of no great importance. You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold.”

∼Fante J

“It was a place as blank as a sheet of paper. It was the place I had always been looking for… Flat expanses would call to me… These are the places where the desert is most itself: stark, open, free, an invitation to wander, a laboratory of perception, scale, light, a place where loneliness has a luxurious flavor…”

∼Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“The journey of every ignorant and obedient society always ends up in the same place: In the desert!”

∼Mehmet Murat ildan

“She thirsted for love, but found only a mirage. Some hearts are a desert you can die wandering in.”

∼John Mark Green

“This was the desert, everything all at once, whether it was needed or not. What survived had learned to save, live carefully, and keep a low profile, even appear to be dead for long periods. Perseverance and patience.”

∼James Anderson, The Never-Open Desert Diner

“The sand doesn’t care if you’re made of flesh or stone.”

∼Joaquin Lowe, Bullet Catcher

“True understanding lies beyond the desert”

∼Bangambiki Habyarimana, The Great Pearl of Wisdom

“Desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance.”

∼Jean Baudrillard, America

“In the desert of the heart, tears do not touch the ground. (Dans le désert du coeur, – Les larmes ne touchent la terre.)”

∼Charles de Leusse

“The day here is a something without value, a mere torment suffered by living creatures as they await the night. Night is deliverance.”

∼Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North

“That’s what Alice liked about the desert, its constant relentless conflict with itself. The desert was unexpectedly beautiful and horrible at once.”

∼Joy Williams

“Are you in a desert? Then be a camel! Be compatible with the reality!”

∼Mehmet Murat ildan

“I pray that we would let God take us through the desert – not just so that we can arrive in the Promised Land, but so that we can talk, or simply listen, to Him along the way.”

∼Katie Kiesler, Because I Love You

“In the desert I had found a freedom unattainable in civilization; a life unhampered by possessions, since everything that was not a necessity was an encumbrance. I had found too, a comradeship inherent in the circumstances, and the belief that tranquility was to be found there.”

∼Wilfred Thesiger

“I would enter the desert alone, to leave in the sand endless footprints only to be obliterated by the wind, to walk the same path each day expecting the same path tomorrow, and perhaps to cease wondering at the bloom and wither of lilies only to linger for death. But no, even in the desert, I would seek a new sanctuary, to contemplate a grain of sand in a sea of dryness…”

∼Leonard Seet, Meditation on Space-Time

“What did you say, Gram? About there being no church out here?” “I said that the sky was the roof of my cathedral and the desert was its floor and any time I paid attention, I could feel a higher power all around me.”

∼Terri Farley, Blue Wings

“In a heartbeat, he understands why religions are born on the sands – there is nothing here for a man but his own mind.”

∼Sara Sheridan

“The poor looking shepherd of the dessert is in substance very rich with all the magical treasures of the desert.”

∼Mehmet Murat ildan

“Just as water is the only thing that can relieve thirst in the desert, the provision of God’s Word is the only thing that can satisfy our spiritual thirst.”

∼Jim George, A Man After God’s Own Heart

“Being negative only makes a journey more difficult. You may be given a cactus, but you don’t have to sit on it.” 

∼Joyce Meyer

Desert Flower Quotes

“Nothing is all bad. There are very beautiful flowers in the desert amidst the spikes and thorns. Just don’t let them take over. In the garden of love there is little room for prickly things.”

∼Kate McGahan

“A rose in a desert can only survive on its strength, not its beauty.”

∼ Matshona Dhliwayo

“A flower blooming in the desert proves to the world that adversity, no matter how great, can be overcome.”

∼Matshona Dhliwayo

“A daisy blooming in a desert is worth more than a rose blossoming in a rainforest.”

∼Matshona Dhliwayo

“Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

∼Paul Hoffman

“Learn the discipline of being surprised not by suffering but by joy. As we grow old, there is suffering ahead of us, immense suffering, a suffering that will continue to tempt us to think that we have chosen the wrong road. But don’t be surprised by pain. Be surprised by joy, be surprised by the little flower that shows its beauty in the midst of a barren desert, and be surprised by the immense healing power that keeps bursting forth like springs of fresh water from the depth of our pain.”

∼Henri Nouwen

“If a flower can flourish in the desert, you can flourish anywhere.”

∼Matshona Dhliwayo

“Love is wild; its whole beauty is in its wildness. It comes like a breeze with great fragrance, fills your heart, and suddenly where there was a desert there is a garden full of flowers.”

∼Osho, Intimacy: Trusting Oneself and the Other

“If seeds waited for perfect conditions to grow, there would be no plants in the desert.”

∼Matshona Dhliwayo

“A cactus is a desert’s rose.”

∼Matshona Dhliwayo

“A flower in a desert still has no reason to envy a thorn in a rainforest.”

∼Matshona Dhliwayo

“It is the desert that tests a seed’s strength.”

∼Matshona Dhliwayo

“The cactus thrives in the desert while the fern thrives in the wetland.

The fool will try to plant them in the same flowerbox.

The florist will sigh and add a wall divider and proper soil to both sides.

The grandparent will move the flowerbox halfway out of the sun.

The child will turn it around properly so that the fern is in the shade, and not the cactus.

The moral of the story?

Kids are smart.”

∼Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Rain in Desert Quotes

“I will love you like the desert burns along the sun when they are together,
and when you will be gone, just like every one else,

I will cry for you like the snow that melts at the first hint of summer…

and hoping that you’ll be back

I will miss you like the clouds lose themselves when it rains…”

∼Sanhita Baruah

“THE RIVER OF A WOMAN

Man is like a desert without the rain of a woman.

Nothing can be born and grown without her nourishment.

She is a life-giving river that gives and loves without holding anything back.

And without her water, man would walk around aimlessly, feeling incomplete and hollow like an empty well.

The longer he roams, the deeper the hole within his soul expands, growing bigger and bigger like a barren tree whose branches resemble the cracks on hard, dry soil.

And he shall continue to feel incomplete and malnourished, until – he encounters a godly woman, to show him life and quench his thirst.”

∼Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“You should not see the desert simply as some faraway place of little rain. There are many forms of thirst.”

∼William Langewiesche

“The field of the soul must be watered by the rain with tears of love; otherwise it will become a desert.”

∼Sorin Cerin, Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom

“Waiting for you is like waiting for rain in this desert: useless and disappointing.”

∼A Cinderella Story

“She was rain to a parched desert
She was color to a gray sky
She was the beautiful butterfly you longed to possess
But I let her fly
For fear of breaking her wings!”

∼Avijeet Das

100 Rain Quotes to Enjoy Life’s Rainy Days

How to find your oasis in the desert of life

If you become familiar with your blessings, you will recognize them more. You will know what to look for, and you will know what only a mirage is.

Mirages are what take your eyes off your goals. They are shortcuts and get-rich-quick schemes. They waste your time and leave you worse off than you were before. Mirages only lead you deeper into the desert of life and take your eyes off your blessings.

The Only Oasis You Regret

What people regret at the end of their lives is what they didn’t do when they had the chance. They let blessings and opportunities pass that they wish they could have back. Don’t let your next oasis pass without being grateful.

Give it deep thought, and consider how it can improve your life. Maybe you will find that you are traveling in the wrong direction and your map is upside down. Or, maybe you are waiting for a better oasis to fill your empty canteen.

Take a moment to count your blessings so you don’t pass them by.

Are you in love with your desert story? Or are you afraid that you will lose the attention of others if you acknowledge a blessing? Let go of your desert story if it keeps you from growing and creating an extraordinary life. You can’t help anyone if you are still wandering in the desert.

What are your favorite desert quotes and life lessons?