“Travel, and you will find a replacement for what you leave behind; strive, for the sweetness of life is in striving.”

From the Diwan attributed to al-Shafi‘i, a man who left Gaza as a child for Makkah, then Madinah, Yemen, Baghdad and finally Egypt, where he died. The lines that follow in the poem make the case from nature: water that stands still goes stale, the lion that never leaves its ground catches nothing, and the arrow that never leaves the bow hits nothing.