22 Quotes by Dervla Murphy

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

Even a brief glimpse of what we were is valuable to help understand what we are

I never can understand why most people imagine a bed – some sort of bed: any sort of bed – to be a prerequisite of sleep.

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

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.

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.

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.

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