Marco Polo

The people of Russia are very tall and handsome, but they are very lazy.

The people of China are very cleanly in their persons, and they eat with chopsticks.

The people of Java are very rich, and they are great traders, but they are very cruel.

The people of Madagascar are the most barbarous in the world, and they eat human flesh.

The people of Zanzibar are very black, and they are great sorcerers.

The people of Abyssinia are Christians, but they are very ignorant and superstitious.

The people of Turkestan are very handsome, but they are very cruel.

The people of the Himalayas are very ugly, and they live like beasts.

The people of the Indus Valley are very black, and they go naked, save for a loincloth.

The people of the Euphrates Valley are very handsome, but they are very treacherous.

The people of the Sahara Desert are very poor, and they live like beasts.

I have not told the half of what I saw.

I speak and speak, [...] but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. [...] It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.

Without stones there is no arch.

I believe it was God's will that we should come back, so that men might know the things that are in the world, since, as we have said in the first chapter of this book, no other man, Christian or Saracen, Mongol or pagan, has explored so much of the world as Messer Marco, son of Messer Niccolo Polo, great and noble citizen of the city of Venice.

My heart beats as much as I can breathe.

We go naked because we want nothing of this world; for we came into the world naked and unclothed.

As for not being ashamed to show our members, the fact is that we do no sin with them and therefore have no more shame in them than you have when you show your hand or face or the other parts of your body that do not lead you into carnal sin; whereas you use your members to commit sin and lechery, and so you cover them up and are ashamed of them. But we are no more ashamed of showing them than we are of showing our fingers, because we do not sin with them.