Dervla Murphy Quotes

On this page you can find the TOP of Dervla Murphy's best quotes! We hope you will find some sayings from Cyclist Dervla Murphy's in our collection, which will inspire you to new achievements! There are currently 27 quotes on this page collected since November 28, 1931! Share our collection of quotes with your friends on social media so that they can find something to inspire them!
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  • On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents and a few days later I decided to cycle to India.

    1965 Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle.
  • [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.

    Years   Cities   People  
  • 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.

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

    People   World   Height  
    Dervla Murphy (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.69, The Overlook Press
  • one feels guilty on behalf of Western civilisation. What damage are we doing, blindly and swiftly, to those races who are being taught that because we are materially richer we must be emulated without question? What compels us to infect everyone else with our own sick urgency to change, soften and standardise? How can we have the effrontery to lord it over peoples who retain what we have lost - a sane awareness that what matters most is immeasurable?

  • Without evading the grimness of life in much of modern Africa, one can recognize that this continent is not yet sick as our continent is sick. Most Africans remain plugged into reality. In contrast we have become disconnected from it, reduced to compulsively consuming units, taught to worship 'economic growth' - the ultimate unreality in a finite world.

    Reality   Sick   Growth  
  • To me writing was not a career but a necessity. And so it remains, though I am now, technically, a professional writer. The strength of this inborn desire to write has always baffled me. It is understandable that the really gifted should feel an overwhelming urge to use their gift; but a strong urge with only a slight gift seems almost a genetic mistake.

  • the sudden violent dispossession accompanying a refugee flight is much more than the loss of a permanent home and a traditional occupation, or than the parting from close friends and familiar places. It is also the death of the person one has become in a particular context, and every refugee must be his or her own midwife at the painful process of rebirth.

    Home   Loss   Occupation  
  • hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.

    Hate   Hatred   Damage  
    Dervla Murphy (1995). “Transylvania and Beyond: A Travel Memoir”, p.73, The Overlook Press
  • It is far easier to explain to a three-year-old how babies are made than to explain the processes whereby bread or sugar appear on the table.

    Baby   Years   Tables  
  • 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.

  • 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 (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.74, The Overlook Press
  • one of the advantages of cycling is that it automatically prevents a journey from becoming an Expedition.

    Dervla Murphy (1995). “Full Tilt: Dunkirk to Delhi by Bicycle”, HarperPerennial
  • This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this.

    Moving   Epic   Past  
    Dervla Murphy (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.39, The Overlook Press
  • 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 (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.70, The Overlook Press
  • The Irish have a flair for wringing from death the last drop of emotion and they do not quite understand those who react otherwise.

    Lasts   Emotion   Flair  
  • 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.

    Country   War   America  
    Dervla Murphy (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.53, The Overlook Press
  • ... I know a number of Western children who would benefit greatly if only someone were primitive enough to inhibit the development of their personalities.

  • ... strong bonds are forged in high emotional temperatures.

  • poverty denotes a lack of necessities and simplicity a lack of needs.

    Dervla Murphy (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.56, The Overlook Press
  • 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.

    Country   Years   Two  
    Dervla Murphy (1987). “Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle”, p.76, The Overlook Press
  • 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.

    Heaven   Library   Unions  
  • apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.

    Clouds   Air   Racism  
    Dervla Murphy (2001). “South From the Limpopo”, p.55, The Overlook Press
  • 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.

    Real   Water   Desire  
  • perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood. ... Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling.

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

    Dervla Murphy (2001). “South From the Limpopo”, p.235, The Overlook Press
  • Each human spirit is immortalfor time cannot destroy

    Time   Spirit   Humans  
    1968 In Ethiopia with a Mule.
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We hope you have found the saying you were looking for in our collection! At the moment, we have collected 27 quotes from the Cyclist Dervla Murphy, starting from November 28, 1931! We periodically replenish our collection so that visitors of our website can always find inspirational quotes by authors from all over the world! Come back to us again!
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