great quotes on travel, from rick steves' blog

The value of travel is nothing new.

Nearly 1,500 years ago, Muhammad said, "Don't tell me how educated you are. Tell me how much you've traveled."

Thomas Jefferson wrote: "Travel makes a person wiser, if less happy."

Mark Twain wrote: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness."

the nice thing about being a cynic is that you are either right or pleasantly surprised

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who do not possess it - George Bernard Shaw"

“But If Not” MLK

I say to you, this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be, and one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid.

You refuse to do it because you want to live longer. You’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you’re afraid that somebody will stab or shoot or bomb your house. So you refuse to take a stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at ninety.

And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

You died when you refused to stand up for right.

You died when you refused to stand up for truth.

You died when you refused to stand up for justice.”

mahabone

socialize the risks, privatize the rewards

from "eiger dreams" by jon krakauer

John Menlove Edwards....had been one of the preeminent British rock climbers of his day.

Dr. Edwards regarded climbing as a "psycho-neurotic tendency" rather than sport; he climbed not for fun but to find refuge from the inner torment which characterized his existence. I remember, that spring of 1977, being especially taken by a passage from an Edwards short story titled "Letter From a Man":

So, as you would imagine, I grew up exuberant in body but with a nervy, craving mind. It was wanting something more, something tangible. It sought for reality intensely, always if it were not there...
But you see at once what I do.
I climb.