I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.

'I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China, and continue my profession.' 'As sanitary engineer?' 'No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries of the world.'

To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries. To lose a notebook was a catastrophe.

Travel doesn't merely broaden the mind. It makes the mind.

I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones.

A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, towards the end of his journey, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will.

And the formation of man is the most pressing problem facing humanity.