Dervla Murphy > Quotes

“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

“In the travellers’ world, social media have enlarged the generation gap. The internet has brought a change in the very concept of travel as a process taking one away from the familiar into the unknown. Now the familiar is not left behind and the unknown has become familiar even before one leaves home. Unpredictability – to my generation the salt that gave travelling its savour – seems unnecessary if not downright irritating to many of the young. The sunset challenge – where to sleep? – has been banished by the ease of booking into a hostel or organised campsite with a street plan provided by the internet. Moreover, relatives and friends evidently expect regular reassurance about the traveller’s precise location and welfare – and vice versa, the traveller needing to know that all is well back home.
Notoriously, dependence on instant communication with distant family and friends is known to stunt the development of self-reliance. Perhaps that is why, amongst younger travellers, one notices a new timidity.”
― Dervla Murphy

“For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.”
― Dervla Murphy

“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

“If I Am murdered en route it will have been well worth while!”
― Dervla Murphy

“Life would be just a neutral wasteland if one always ran away from the joys of love merely because one knew that pain and grief might be involved too.”
― Dervla Murphy, Tibetan Foothold

“There has been a sustained and dreadfully successful campaign to make most people dissatisfied with what I would call the normal life and some would call the simple life.”
― Dervla Murphy

“Even a brief glimpse of what we were is valuable to help understand what we are”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“To me, city-dwellers are The Dispossessed, unfortunates who have been deprived of every creature’s right to territory. There is a sense in which country folk, however impoverished, own their birthplace and all the land around it that can be covered in a long day’s tramp – the natural, immemorial limit to the territory of a human being.”
― Dervla Murphy, Wheels Within Wheels: The Making of a Traveller

“I received a tremendous 'welcome-back' from my friends here, and was delighted to find Colonel Shah, whom I'd already met at Peshawar, Bagdada and Swat, among those present. The evening passed in the usual way—sitting on the lawn within reach of mobile electric fans, sipping fruit-juices and talking. Social life here emphasizes how nearly we Westerners have lost the art of conversation. Instead of switching on the 'telly' or dashing out to a show, how pleasant it is to sit and talk quietly about the books one has read or the people one has met or the places one has seen. And surely the individual exchange of ideas with our fellow-men is more worthwhile than mute dependence on what someone else's brain has devised for our entertainment.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“They repudiate their native culture yet cannot succeed in adopting an alien civilization which they imagine is superior, though they don't understand the first thing about it. Give me the nomads' outlook every time—they haven't heard of America yet. I don't claim to know the right answer to the 'underdeveloped' problem but I feel most strongly that the Communist answer is less wrong than the Western; the Communists have much more imaginative understanding of different national temperaments, as two Russians I spoke to here today revealed very clearly. They want to impose Communism as a way of life, but with the minimum of damage to the traditional foundations of the country concerned, whereas Westerners have told me repeatedly that they want to bulldoze those foundations right away and start a nice, new, hygienic society from scratch-an ambition that seems to me almost too stupid to be true.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“This house reveals what some might describe as the poverty of Afghanistan but what I prefer to call its simplicity, since poverty denotes a lack of necessities and simplicity a lack of needs. The Governor is the most important man in the district yet the poorest Irish peasant would have a more elaborate home, though when one examines it every essential comfort is here.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“I'm quite sorry to be leaving Persia. Beneath all the physical dirt and moral corruption there is an elegance and dignity about life here which you can't appreciate at first, while suffering under the impact of the more obvious and disagreeable national characteristics. The graciousness with which peasants greet each other and the effortless art with which a few beautiful rags and pieces of silver are made to furnish and decorate a whole house—in these and many other details Persia can still teach the West. I suppose it's all a question of seeing one of the oldest and richest civilizations in the world long past its zenith.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“During the meal we discussed the 'progress' now being made by Afghanistan. The Government has recently produced a very fine book called Afghanistan: Ancient Land with Modern Ways, which, as the title implies, gives a rosy picture of the present situation-but that is understandable. What alarms me is that the general tone of the book reveals the Afghan Government's unquestioning acceptance of progress along Western lines as being something entirely good and desirable. This educated Afghan family held the same tragic belief in the superiority of our ways over their ways. It is frightening to belong to, and be in a fractional way responsible for, a civilization that has such a hypnotic fascination for simple people everywhere-people whose very simplicity leaves them totally at our mercy. And so far we have shown little mercy, if that means anything more than the distribution of vaccines and the building of roads. 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. The present state of our own national psychologies is a good enough advertisement for the need of a far more gradual change. I tried to point out to my friends that once they have created this terrible idol of the Modern State it will enslave them for ever and then it will be too late for them to see that 'the good old days' were best; they will be forced to continue worshipping their idol whatever the cost to their humanity. However, they thought I was mad to find more happiness and peace in an Afghan village than in a European industrial city.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“I thank God for my sanguine temperament, which refuses to allow me to believe in disaster until it is finally manifest”
― Dervla Murphy

“I can't even begin to imagine what it must feel like to be a Christian missionary in a Muslim country where one daren't ever attempt to convert anybody, except by the vague method of 'example'. But then to me Christian missionaries in Muslim countries, however genuine their fervour, are at best unattractive manifestations of self-righteousness and at worst an impertinence. Yet that attitude is narrow too in its own way. If you are convinced of your duty to spread the gospel there is obviously a certain nobility in settling in a place like Peshawar, without hope of any material gain whatsoever, and in patiently leading a Christian life for the purpose of influencing those around you.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“American bible-belt extraction – contempt for ‘evil African superstitions’ also persists. Yet I, as an agnostic, can see no qualitative difference between believing in witchcraft and the power of the ancestors and believing in the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection, never mind transubstantiation and papal infallibility.”
― Dervla Murphy, The Ukimwi Road: from Kenya to Zimbabwe

“At breakfast we had an interesting discussion on the various Christian workers in Pakistan. I was understandably gratified to notice that everyone to whom I have spoken is very appreciative of the fact that no attempt at conversion is ever made by the Catholic teachers or medical workers. In the past thirty-five years, during which they have educated thousands of Muslim girls, the Presentation nuns haven't had one convert; I've spoken by now to over twenty of their past pupils and the nuns are universally loved and admired. On the other hand, all the Protestant Missions (educational and medical) stink in Muslim nostrils because their teaching and medical treatment is always accompanied by what the Muslims call 'insulting propaganda.

In their schools the children have to study the Bible and Christian doctrine and with their medicines they also dispense leaflets and pamphlets on the 'Good Path to God'. I know that this is true because I visited a Protestant Mission Hospital the other day and the matron showed me the 'literature' they distribute—awful sickly stuff that would put a Pope off Christianity for life. My host summed it up pretty well this morning when he said, 'The Protestants seem to come here because they hate Islam and the Catholics because they love God.' No doubt it's a matter of opinion which attitude is correct, but personally I'm entirely with the Catholics who have the good sense and good manners to admit in practice, if not in theory, that Islam is a different, but not necessarily inferior or wrong 'Path to God'. And, of course, the result is that in Pakistan a genuine good feeling exists between educated Muslims and Catholics, though here, as elsewhere, the semi-illiterate Mullahs hate any form of Christianity.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“Not for the first time, I am astonished and humbled by the tolerance of Muslims, who so easily accept the fact that my standards differ from theirs, yet give me no feeling of being regarded as inferior on that account. Even more remarkable, the liberty which they recognize as my inheritance does not deter them from treating me with a courtesy too rarely found in modern Europe; by this civilized fusion of our two cultures I have all the advantages and none of the disadvantages of their own womenfolk. I think it is fair to say that the modern Muslim, even if he is an uneducated peasant, shows less prejudice towards other religions than we Christians do, with our persistent tendency to brand any religion not our own as ignorant superstition'. This Muslim tolerance makes it all the sadder that politicians so often artificially stimulate religious differences for their own ends.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“I had entered my first Orthodox communist country as a 'neutral', equally suspicious of both pro- and anti-communist propaganda, but after a week in Bulgaria I left it as an admirer of the limited good that Communism can achieve within less than two decades.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“Kabul reminds me of Sofia in that the traffic is virtually nil by capital city standards;”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“We remain part of Nature, however startling our scientific advances, and the more successfully we forget or ignore this fact, the less we can be proud of being men.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“The Protestants seem to come here because they hate Islam and the Catholics because they love God.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“On leaving Constantinople, where one spends a small fortune on beggars, I had resolved to give nothing to anyone during the rest of the journey lest I end up with a begging-bowl myself. But of course Persia has undermined that resolution: the pathetic wretches seen here simply can't be ignored. (Many of them in the towns and villages are lepers diagnosed too late for treat-ment- even if treatment were available in their area, which it often isn't-and left to die slowly at home.) So now I've got the problem worked out systematically. I reckon that by being a guest at my friend's house I'm saving 1 pound a day, which I distribute as baksheesh. This obviously is an oblique form of selfishness; one couldn't come home after a walk through Teheran and settle down to enjoy the luxuries of Capitalism if one hadn't done something, however trivial, to alleviate the surrounding misery. Yet it's well to remember that this misery is not as total or as neglected as it appears to be. One of the religious duties of Muslims—as of Christians—is to give alms to the needy and the vast majority of Muslims of every sect regularly fulfill this duty in proportion to their means. In effect the citizens of these countries provide for their deprived brothers as generously as do the tax-paying citizens of a Welfare State and the disparity between the circumstances of the disabled of Persia and the disabled of Britain is no greater than that between the circumstances of the wroking men of the two countries: in fact it may well be less, though the distribution of funds is more haphazard. Also the Muslim method of providing ‘Social Services’ has the important virtue of maintaining a natural and humane link between individuals. It is obviously more desirable to have citizens giving to beggers voluntarily, out of compassion, rather than to have them grumblingly paying taxes to an impersonal government which dispenses what is left, after its civil servants have been paid, to unknown sufferers who are mere names in a filing cabinet.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“I never can understand why most people imagine a bed – some sort of bed: any sort of bed – to be a prerequisite of sleep.”
― Dervla Murphy, On a Shoestring to Coorg: An Experience of Southern India

“The man-in-the-bazaar is easily led and the virulent propaganda that emanates”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“The hardships and poverty of my youth had been a good apprenticeship for this form of travel. I had been brought up to understand that material possessions and physical comfort should never be confused with success, achievement and security. And soon I was discovering for myself that our real material needs are very few and that the extras now presented as 'needs' not only endanger true contentment but diminish our human dignity.”
― Dervla Murphy, Wheels Within Wheels

“It is disconcerting how men in the religious saddle repeatedly abuse their spiritual authority for personal gain.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle

“Keeping one’s patience is really a question of remembering one’s place in the universe.”
― Dervla Murphy, Eight Feet in the Andes: Travels with a Mule in Unknown Peru

“Today I've been reflecting on the benefits bestowed by the social anonymity of a traveller 'in the wilds'. To the peasants and tribesmen here one is merely a human being—outwardly strange but fundamentally one of them—and their spontaneous acceptance and hospitality is extended with an air of full and unselfconscious equality. In contrast, how deep is the gulf between groups of human beings in our society—go into a pub in Connemara or a café in rural Italy or even a posada in the remotest part of relatively unspoiled Spain and you find it impossible to establish the same easy rapport. You are at once noted as a non-peasant and are therefore someone to be envied, or admired, or despised, or kept aloof from, as individual temperaments dictate. Probably you will be treated most kindly by the peasants there, but at the deepest level you are automatically isolated because you have (they imagine) more money or more education or 'better' manners than they have. So I appreciate the chance to share the people's lives here for a time without regarding myself, or being regarded by them, as an intruder. Yet I also appreciate coming back to converse among friends who are on my own wave-length.”
― Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle