The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail in his shell and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.

... there are few things that can reconcile us fully to our parting with a world of which the longest life can see so little and whose beauties have so extraordinary a variety.

Risk is the salt and sugar of life.

every frontier is doomed to produce an opposition beyond it. Nothing short of the universal can build the unfenced peace.

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

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

To think to keep things as they are, is to let them move unpredictably, since nothing but death will still the beat of the heart or keep the universe from its perpetual motion.