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

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

... 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 us in a place of which we had no memories and where no one knew our name.

If the world seems unfair or beyond our understanding, sublime places suggest that it is not surprising that things should be thus. We are the playthings of the forces that laid out the oceans and chiselled the mountains.

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

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 here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

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

Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape...

I took my hands from my pockets and ran them along the bricks' gnarled and pitted surface. They seemed light and ready to crumble. I felt the impulse to kiss them, so as to experience more closely a texture that reminded me of blocks of pumice or halva from a Lebanese delicatessen.