Richard Francis Burton quotes

Richard Francis Burton was a British explorer, writer, linguist, and translator renowned for his travels in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. His adventurous spirit and mastery of languages enabled him to uncover many cultures and traditions. He is especially famous for translating “One Thousand and One Nights” and for his daring journey to Mecca in disguise. Here are 101 of his quotes:

Conquer thyself, till thou has done this, thou art but a slave; for it is almost as well to be subjected to another's appetite as to thine own.

Richard Francis Burton

All Faith is false, all Faith is true: Truth is the shattered mirror strown In myriad bits; while each believes his little bit the whole to own.

Richard Francis Burton

Support a compatriot against a native, however the former may blunder or plunder.

Richard Francis Burton

The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.

Richard Francis Burton

The Now, that indivisible point which studs the length of infinite line Whose ends are nowhere, is thine all, the puny all thou callest thine.

Richard Francis Burton

Do what thy manhood bids thee do, from none but self expect applause; He noblest lives and noblest dies who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

Richard Francis Burton

I was surrounded at the time by about a dozen of the enemy, whose clubs rattled upon me without mercy, and the strokes of my sabre were rendered uncertain by the energetic pushes of an attendant who thus hoped to save me.

Richard Francis Burton

Travellers, like poets, are mostly an angry race: by falling into a daily fit of passion, I proved to the governor and his son, who were profuse in their attentions, that I was in earnest.

Richard Francis Burton

Travellers like poets are mostly an angry race.

Richard Francis Burton

Friends of my youth, a last adieu! haply some day we meet again; Yet ne'er the self-same men shall meet; the years shall make us other men.

Richard Francis Burton

Indeed he knows not how to know who knows not also how to 'unknow.

Richard Francis Burton

"Tush!" quoth the Zahid, "well we ken the teaching of the school abhorr'd "That maketh man automaton, mind a secretion, soul a word." "Of molecules and protoplasm you matter-mongers prompt to prate; "Of jelly-speck development and apes that grew to man's estate." Vain cavil! all that is hath come either by Mir'acle or by Law; - Why waste on this your hate and fear, why waste on that your love and awe?

Richard Francis Burton

Hardly we find the path of love, to sink the self, forget the "I," When sad suspicion grips the heart, when Man, the Man begins to die:.

Richard Francis Burton

"'Tis blessed to believe"; you say: The saying may be true enow And it can add to Life a light: - only remains to show us how.

Richard Francis Burton

Starting in a hollowed log of wood - some thousand miles up a river, with an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself 'Why?' and the only echo is 'damned fool!... the Devil drives'.

Richard Francis Burton

"Th' immortal mind of mortal man!" we hear yon loud-lunged Zealot cry; Whose mind but means his sum of thought, an essence of atomic "I." Thought is the work of brain and nerve, in small-skulled idiot poor and mean; In sickness sick, in sleep asleep, and dead when Death lets drop the scene.

Richard Francis Burton

Man worships self: his God is Man; the struggling of the mortal mind To form its model as 'twould be, the perfect of itself to find.

Richard Francis Burton

One death to a man is a serious thing: a dozen neutralize one another.

Richard Francis Burton

That creatures endowed with the mere possibility of liberty should not always choose the Good appears natural.

Richard Francis Burton

Of the gladest moments in human life, methinks is the departure upon a distant journey to unknown lands.

Richard Francis Burton

Presently our fire being exhausted, and the enemy pressing on with spear and javelin, the position became untenable; the tent was nearly battered down by clubs, and had we been entangled in its folds, we should have been killed without the power of resistance.

Richard Francis Burton

There is no God, no man-made God; a bigger, stronger, crueller man; Black phantom of our baby-fears, ere Thought, the life of Life, began.

Richard Francis Burton