The past is our treasure. Its works, whether we know them or not, flourish in our lives with whatever strength they had. From it we draw provision for our journey, the collected wisdom whose harvests are all ours to reap and carry with us, though we may never live again in the fields that grew them.

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

The greatest of mythologies divided its gods into creators, preservers and destroyers. Tidiness obviously belongs to the second category, which mitigates the terrific impact of the other two.

I do think we should be provided with a new body about the age of thirty or so when we have learnt to attend to it with consideration.

Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence.

This is one of the charms of the desert, that removing as it does nearly all the accessories of life, we see the thin thread of necessities on which our human existence is suspended.

The true call of the desert, of the mountains, or the sea, is their silence - free of the networks of dead speech.