In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are always being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.

our longing is our pledge, and blessed are the homesick, for they shall come home.

It is not a bad thing in a tale that you understand only half of it.

A giraffe is so much a lady that one refrains from thinking of her legs, but remembers her as floating over the plains in long garb, draperies of morning mist her mirage.

some travelers are drawn forward by a goal lying before them in the way iron is drawn to the magnet. Others are driven on by a force lying behind them. In such a way the bowstring makes the arrow fly.

It is not the visions but the activity which makes you happy, and the joy and glory of the flier is the flight itself. . . Every time I have gone up in an aeroplane and looked down have realized I was free of the ground, I have had the consciousness of a new discovery. "I see:" I have thought, "This was the idea. And now I understand everything."

No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.