"Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first..." - Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Among provocatives, the next best thing to good preaching is bad preaching. I have even more thoughts during or enduring it than at other times.”

“Yet some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise, and wherever the vein of thought reaches down into the profound, there is no danger from vanity. Solemn friends will warn them of the danger of the head's being turned by the flourish of trumpets, but they can afford to smile.”

“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.”

“I am very glad I have travelled. Travel improves the mind wonderfully, and does away with all one's prejudices.”

“I travel 250 days a year. There are chef friends who I only see every couple of years. By conventional standards I'm a bad friend. I'm not there to remember your birthday or to offer you words of support through Twitter. I'm not up on what you're doing in New York because I'm not in New York. I'm not what people call in parenting circles "present."”

“Hotels are the only proper places for lecturers. When I am ill-natured I so enjoy the freedom of a hotel where I can ring up a domestic and give him a quarter and then break furniture over him.”

“In going where you have to go, and doing what you have to do, and seeing what you have to see, you'll dull and blunt the instrument you write with. But I would rather have it bent and dull and know I had to put it to the grindstone again and hammer it into shape and put a whetstone to it, and know that I had something to write about, than to have it bright and shining and nothing to say, or smooth and well-oiled in the closet, but unused.”

“Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the darksome hours Weeping, and watching for the morrow,- He knows you not, ye heavenly Powers.”

“Even when one sits in the prisoner's dock, it is interesting to hear talk about oneself.”