Sayyid Tahir al-Hashimi Quotes
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The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.
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Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.
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Foras Road has a sordid reputation (…) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution.
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A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.
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Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.
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With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.
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Close your senses and the imagination comes alive. It's inside us all, dulled by endless television reruns and by a society that reins in fantasy as something not to be trusted, something to be purged. But it's in there, deep inside, a spark waiting to set a touch-paper alight.
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In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you have to coax the owner to sell.
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The backstreet cafe in Casablanca was for me a place of mystery, a place with a soul, a place with danger. There was a sense that the safety nets had been cut away, that each citizen walked upon the high wire of this, the real world. I longed not merely to travel through it, but to live in such a city.
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I was no longer troubled when he pulled out a machete in a crowded bar, tried to pick up schoolgirls, or threatened to scalp us, then rip off our heads and scoop out our brains.
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Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things.
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The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.
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Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.
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For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news -- as you learn how much more of it's been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my home
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On a hard jungle journey nothing is so important as having a team you can trust.
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Most journeys have a clear beginning, but on some the ending is less well-defined. The question is, at what point do you bite your lip and head for home?
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Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.
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Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does.
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The inertia of a jungle village is a dangerous thing. Before you know it your whole life has slipped by and you are still waiting there.
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A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it.
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Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
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Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spent
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To be selfless, you would give charity anonymously, walj softly on the earth, and look out for others-even total strangers-before you look out for yourself. For the Arab mind, the self is an obstacle, an impediment, in humanity's quest foe real progress.
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In moments of great uncertainty on my travels, I have always felt that something is protecting me, that i will come to no harm.