It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.

I dislike being an anvil for the hammering out of other people's virtues.

To awaken alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea of what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown.

Risk is the salt and sugar of life.

All greatness in style begins, I imagine, with such respect, deep and passionate enough to produce a humility which will not assert itself at the expense even of inanimate things: out of which submissiveness a desire to serve is born, in disinterested accuracy toward the object, whatever it may be.

All our acts have sacramental possibilities.

Words are the only arteries of thought our poor human body possesses.

The camel carries on his dreary circular task with his usual slow and pompous step and head poised superciliously, as if it were a ritual affair above the comprehension of the vulgar; and no doubt he comforts himself for the dullness of life by a sense of virtue, like many other formalists beside him.

The beckoning counts, and not the clicking of the latch behind you.

The camel is an ugly animal, seen from above. Its shoulders slope formless like a sack, its silly little ears and fluff of bleached curls behind them have a respectable, boarding-house look, like some faded neatness that dresses for propriety but never dressed for love.

Whoever designed this frigging map was having a laugh. Just around the corner, my arse.

It is so pleasant to feel that we have succeeded in doing what all the People who Know told us was impossible.

The only thing for a pacifist to do is to find a substitute for war.

To feel, and think, and learn -- learn always: surely that is being alive and young in the real sense.

From love one can only escape at the price of life itself; and no lessening of sorrow is worth exile from that stream of all things human and divine.

Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence.

The true fruit of travel is perhaps the feeling of being nearly everywhere at home.

The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.

Accuracy is the basis of style. Words dress our thoughts and should fit; and should fit not only in their utterances, but in their implications, their sequences, and their silences, just as in architecture the empty spaces are as important as those that are filled.

It is a matter of civilizing everyone or not being civilized at all: the decay has always come from a partial civilization.