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I see religion as a storehouse of lots of really good ideas that a secular world should look at, raid, and learn from.

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Pegging your contentment to the overall state of the world rather than of your own life: the basis of morality, or a sort of madness?

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Distress at losing an object can be as much a frustration at the intellectual mystery of the disappearance as about the loss itself.

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At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of ...more

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One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpositioning home with what one knows of alternative realities, as th...more

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Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going traveling in the first place, even...more

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We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean, but awed by what is powerful and noble.

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A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information...more

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... what ease our seemingly entrenched lives might be altered were we simply to walk down a corridor and onto a craft that in a few hours would land u...more

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Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts.

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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

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A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was...more

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If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in ...more

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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

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The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.