“If I were asked to enumerate the pleasures of travel, this would be one of the greatest among them--that so often and so unexpectedly you meet the best in human nature, and seeing it so by surprise and often with a most improbable background, you come, with a sense of pleasant thankfulness, to realize how widely scattered in the world are goodness and courtesy and the love of immaterial things, fair blossoms found in every climate, on every soil.”
“To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.”
“Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.”
“Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.”
“Love of learning is a pleasant and universal bond since it deals with what one is and not what one has.”
“Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.”
“If one were given a single window from which to look upon the changing Eastern world, it should face, I think, the road.”