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.

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

This is excellence - the following of anything for its own sake and with its own integrity.

Generalizations, one is told, are dangerous. So is life, for that matter, and it is built up on generalization - from the earliest effort of the adventurer who dared to eat a second berry because the first had not killed him.

Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.

advertisement ... has brought our disregard for truth into the open without even a figleaf to cover it.

Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles.