Dervla Murphy Quotes

#1. The more I see of unmechanized places and people the more conviced I become that machines have done incalculable damage by unbalancing the relationship between Man and Nature.

Dervla Murphy

#2. For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.' And

Dervla Murphy

#3. I know a number of Western children who would benefit greatly if only someone were primitive enough to inhibit the development of their personalities.

Dervla Murphy

#4. Children can see the beatitudes in nature.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#5. Apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.

Dervla Murphy

#6. Out of fifty mathematical papers presented in brief at such a meeting, it is a rare mathematician indeed who really understands what more than half a dozen are about.

E. T. Bell

#7. Confession is an act of honesty and courage - an act of entrusting ourselves, beyond sin, to the mercy of a loving and forgiving God.

Pope John Paul II

#8. If I Am murdered en route it will have been well worth while!

Dervla Murphy

#9. Strong bonds are forged in high emotional temperatures.

Dervla Murphy

#10. Each human spirit is immortalfor time cannot destroy

Dervla Murphy

#11. There are two phases of enjoyment in journeying through an unknown country - the eager phase of wondering interest in every detail, and the relaxed phase when one feels no longer an observer of the exotic, but a participator in the rhythm of daily life.

Dervla Murphy

#12. Only when you conquer yourself are you ready to conquer the world.

Matshona Dhliwayo

#13. You are mine. You are always going to be mine. It doesn't matter what came before, the only thing that matters is what is now and going forward. There will never be anyone else for you. Only me. Me.

Thea Harrison

#14. The neocortex is not like a computer, parallel or otherwise. Instead of computing answers to problems the neocortex uses stored memories to solve problems and produce behavior.

Jeff Hawkins

#15. Hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.

Dervla Murphy

#16. On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as gifts, and a few days later I decided to cycle to India ... However, I was a cunning child so I kept my ambition to myself, thus avoiding the tolerant amusement it would have provoked among my elders.

Dervla Murphy

#17. Assumed to be australopithecines because there are no other known candidates. I

Bill Bryson

#18. I wonder if those experts who tell us that our sexual appetite is the strongest know what real thirst feels like; I can imagine the desire for water driving someone to commit a crime to which sexual desire could never drive them.

Dervla Murphy

#19. [On Addis Ababa:] Among the city's handicaps are an immaturity for which no one can be blamed, as it was founded only eighty years ago, and a proliferation of architectural excesses for which many people can and should be blamed.

Dervla Murphy

#20. Is this something else our age does - on the one hand make communication easier than ever before, while on the other hand widening the gulf between those who are 'developed' and those who are not?

Dervla Murphy

#21. One of the advantages of cycling is that it automatically prevents a journey from becoming an Expedition.

Dervla Murphy

#22. Buying a bicycle is a momentous event, akin to marriage: you are acquiring a partner.

Dervla Murphy

#23. Undoubtedly the Afghans must be, by our standards, the best-looking people in the world. They have everything; height, proportions, carriage, features and complexion.

Dervla Murphy

#24. A sense of humor has been linked with longevity. It is a possibility that the mental attitude reflected in a lively sense of humor is an important factor predisposing some people toward long life.

Raymond Moody

#25. Whatever the theologians might say about heaven being in a state of union with God, I knew it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly for ever.

Dervla Murphy

#26. Sunnis consider Shias a pack of unwholesome fanatics and Shias consider Sunnis a gang of lukewarm no-goods - there's nothing like religion for spreading brotherly love!

Dervla Murphy

#27. The more I see of life in these 'undeveloped countries' and of the methods adopted to 'improve' them, the more depressed I become. It seems criminal that the backwardness of a country like Afghanistan should be used as an excuse for America and Russia to have a tug-of-war for possession.

Dervla Murphy

#28. With our mad lust for Uniformity and a Higher Standard of Living and Expanding Markets, we go to a country like Afghanistan and cruelly try to jerk her forward two thousand years in two decades, giving no thought to the profound shock this must be to her national psychology.

Dervla Murphy

#29. the fact that she completely obscured his view of the road was quite irrelevant since Asian drivers never look where they're going.

Dervla Murphy

#30. The Irish have a flair for wringing from death the last drop of emotion and they do not quite understand those who react otherwise.

Dervla Murphy