Whatever the advantages of the machine may be - and they are many - the very ease of its use is bound to make away with intimacy - the intercourse of human beings, of animals, or of that which we still think of as the natural world.

The perpetual charm of Arabia is that the traveler finds his level there simply as a human being; the people's directness, deadly to the sentimental or pedantic, likes the less complicated virtues.

On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.

I have long come to believe that, more than any other destruction, our word-recklessness is endangering the future of us all.

Pain and fear and hunger are effects of causes which can be foreseen and known: but sorrow is a debt which someone else makes for us.

Whoever designed this frigging map was having a laugh. Just around the corner, my arse.

I first noticed how the sound of water is like the talk of human voices, and would sometimes wake in the night and listen, thinking that a crowd of people were coming through the woods.