The way to find a needle in a haystack is to sit down.

Conformation ... but not much else. Breeding, but too small a heart. You saw it everywhere - in men, in horses, and in women.

To me, desert has the quality of darkness; none of the shapes you see in it are real or permanent. Like night, the desert is boundless, comfortless, and infinite. Like night, it intrigues the mind and leads it to futility. When you have flown halfway across a desert, you experience the desperation of a sleepless man waiting for dawn which only comes when the importance of its coming is lost.

Talk lives in a man’s head, but sometimes it is very lonely because in the heads of many men there is nothing to keep it company - and so talk goes out through the lips.

It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy; it is just one of those preposterous things that men do like putting a dam across a great river, one tenth of whose volume could engulf the whole of mankind without disturbing the domestic life of a single catfish.

the sun is as dispassionate as the hand of a man who greets you with his mind on other things.

all the science of flying has been captured in the breadth of an instrument board, but not the religion of it.