one feels guilty on behalf of Western civilisation. What damage are we doing, blindly and swiftly, to those races who are being taught that because we are materially richer we must be emulated without question? What compels us to infect everyone else with our own sick urgency to change, soften and standardise? How can we have the effrontery to lord it over peoples who retain what we have lost - a sane awareness that what matters most is immeasurable?

Whatever the theologians might say about heaven being in a state of union with God, I knew it consisted of an infinite library; and eternity was simply what enabled one to read uninterruptedly for ever.

Undoubtedly the Afghans must be, by our standards, the best-looking people in the world. They have everything; height, proportions, carriage, features and complexion.

poverty denotes a lack of necessities and simplicity a lack of needs.

On my tenth birthday a bicycle and an atlas coincided as presents and a few days later I decided to cycle to India.

perhaps there is something more than courtesy behind the dissembling reticence of childhood. ... Most artists dislike having their incomplete work considered and discussed and this analogy, I think, is valid. The child is incomplete, too, and is constantly experimenting as he seeks his own style of thought and feeling.

With our mad lust for Uniformity and a Higher Standard of Living and Expanding Markets, we go to a country like Afghanistan and cruelly try to jerk her forward two thousand years in two decades, giving no thought to the profound shock this must be to her national psychology.