“I hate travelling and explorers.”

— Claude Lévi-Strauss , book Tristes Tropiques

Source: Tristes Tropiques (1955), Ch. 1 : Setting Out, p. 17
Context: I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to tell the story of my expeditions. But how long it has taken me to make up my mind to do so! It is now fifteen years since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period I have often planned to undertake the present work but on each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me from making a start. Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant happenings? Adventure has no place in the anthropologists profession; it is merely one of those unavoidable drawbacks, which detract from his effective work through the incidental loss of weeks or months; there are hours of inaction when the informant is not available; periods of hunger, exhaustion, sickness perhaps; and always the thousand and one dreary tasks which eat away the days to no purpose and reduce dangerous living in the heart of the virgin forest to an imitation of military service … The fact that so much effort and expenditure has to be wasted on reaching the object of our studies bestows no value on that aspect of our profession, and should be seen rather as its negative side. The truths which we seek so far afield only become valid when we have separated them from this dross.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I hate travelling and explorers." by Claude Lévi-Strauss?

Claude Lévi-Strauss 35

French anthropologist and ethnologist 1908–2009

Related quotes

“I love to travel, but I hate to arrive.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

A comment of Einstein's recalled by John Wheeler in Albert Einstein: His influence on physics, philosophy and politics edited by Peter C. Aichelburg, Roman Ulrich Sexl, and Peter Gabriel Bergmann (1979), p. 202
Attributed in posthumous publications

“So, I travel a lot. I hate traveling, I guess 'cause my dad used to beat me with a globe.”

Dave Attell (1965) comedian

"Skanks for the Memories"

“Boredom lies only with the traveler's limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough.”

William Least Heat-Moon book Blue Highways

Part Seven, Chapter 7.
Blue Highways (1982)
Context: Boredom lies only with the traveler's limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.

“Traveling is the main basis for turning people into adventurers and thus becoming fearless, exploring more in life.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Cultural imperialism involved, among many other things, exploration, missionary and humanitarian missions, travel, and the use of education and publishing to disseminate European ideas.”

George Ritzer (1940) American sociologist

Source: Globalization - A Basic Text (2010), Chapter 3, Related Processes I: Imperialism, Colonialism, and More, p. 67

“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey;”

John Hope Franklin (1915–2009) American historian

“Alan Shepard was a great man, a great leader. We were pioneers. If you are an explorer, what more can you ask than to travel into space.”

Alan Shepard (1923–1998) American astronaut

Edgar Mitchell — reported in St. Petersburg Times staff (July 23, 1998) "Alan Shepard Jr. 1923-1998 - Space pioneer", St. Petersburg Times, p. 1A.
About