Until 1914 I loved to travel; I often went to Italy and once spent a few months in India. Since then I have almost entirely abandoned travelling, and I have not been outside of Switzerland for over ten years.

No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

Exploration by real people inspires us.

When I’m doing a book tour in the States, I’ll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don’t know where I am right away. I’ll go to the window, and it doesn’t help there either, especially if you’re in an anonymous strip and it’s the usual Victoria’s Secret, Gap, Chili’s, Applebee’s.

After having dispatched a meal, I went ashore, and found no habitation save a single house, and that without an occupant; we had no doubt that the people had fled in terror at our approach, as the house was completely furnished.

My 2020 Vision for India is to transform it into a developed nation. That cannot be abstract; it is a lifeline.

We forget our pleasures, we remember our sufferings.

I’ll stay in Memphis.

It constitutes a superhuman effort to lead any people in times of crisis. Without them, the changes would be impossible.

In India, people are really glued to the Premier League and La Liga.

Today, India consumes about 682 watts per capita, far lesser than developed nations. As India develops, it will definitely require a lot more energy.

A song has to take on character, shape, body and influence people to an extent that they use it for their own devices. It must affect them not just as a song, but as a lifestyle.

Big stuff and little: learning how to order breakfast in a country where I don’t speak the language and haven’t been before – that’s really satisfying to me. I like that.

You can tell the tree by the fruit it bears. You see it through what the organization is delivering as far as a concrete program. If the tree’s fruit sours or grows brackish, then the time has come to chop it down – bury it and walk over it and plant new seeds.

The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind.

Nothing is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change.

In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.

The true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.

That’s one of the biggest things. Never being home, always traveling, having different interests and focusing on different things, just the time aspect of going back home and seeing them, you don’t have that at all. It was a big sacrifice but, at the end of the day, it was worth it.

You can live within the institutions and work hard to change them.

Conversion is a change of masters. Will we not do as much for our new master, the Lord Jesus, as we did once for our old tyrant lusts?

Anytime we step out boldly to make changes, we take a chance that we might fail. But the only way to get better is to try.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.

I want to work; then, as my kids get older, I want to have adventures. I want to visit all their countries: learn and live inside all their cultures.

I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad and to travel for it too!

One of the huge imbalances in life is the disparity between your daily existence, with its routines and habits, and the dream you have within yourself of some extraordinarily satisfying way of living.

If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’re getting.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

I live half the year on Necker, a tiny island in the Caribbean, and it’s always full of people in party mode. Everyone comes up to the big house, and we’ll be dancing until the early hours to the island’s band, the Front Line.

I think the positive competition between states in India is one of the most positive dynamics that the country has.

Some of my foster families used to send me to the movies to get me out of the house and there I’d sit all day and way into the night. Up in front, there with the screen so big, a little kid all alone, and I loved it. I loved anything that moved up there and I didn’t miss anything that happened and there was no popcorn either.

I’m a wandering gypsy.

Modern travelling is not travelling at all; it is merely being sent to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

I like to combine visits to more than one place when I go on my international tours in order to get more done. I’m from Ahmedabad where we have a saying, ‚Single-fare, double journey.‘

Man lives for science as well as bread.

People from all over the world come to London wanting to make their own mark on it, and they add to the energy and vitality of the capital. It’s got a bit busier since the ’60s, but the more the merrier!

I can imagine in years to come that my papers and memorabilia, my journals and letters, will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do.

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions. Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective.

I remember the first time I had sex – I kept the receipt.

Things alter for the worse spontaneously, if they be not altered for the better designedly.

The glamour of it all! New York! America!

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die; a sustainable world. It could be great.

The traveller has reached the end of the journey!

I like being comfortable at airports, in flip-flops with no jewelry on.

Places I’ve lived since then had to have some kind of uniqueness and character about them. And logically Key West, and then Down Island. So, all of that stuff sort of had it’s roots in New Orleans and went crazy.

It was a strike against me that I didn’t wear baggy jeans and jerseys and that I never hustled, never sold drugs.

Anywhere I go, there is always an incredible crowd that follows me. In Rome, as I land at the airport, even the men kiss me. I love Rome.

A lot of churches have not moved with the times.

In my youth, I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

Feels good to try, but playing a father, I’m getting a little older. I see now that I’m taking it more serious and I do want that lifestyle.

The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.

I think one of my pursuits over the years is trying to answer the question of, ‚What else can you do with a voice other than stand in front of a microphone and sing?‘

Only by going alone in silence, without baggage, can one truly get into the heart of the wilderness. All other travel is mere dust and hotels and baggage and chatter.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

For the execution of the voyage to the Indies, I did not make use of intelligence, mathematics or maps.

Purity of personal life is the one indispensable condition for building up a sound education.

I’m much healthier now.

In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask, ‚why don’t I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden,‘ and they abandon their values.