Tahir Shah
With an enthusiastic team you can achieve almost anything.Collection: Teamwork
A journey, I reflected, is of no merit unless it has tested you.Collection: Journey
A little imagination goes a long way in Fes.Collection: Imagination
A man who embarks on a journey must know when to end it.Collection: Journey
Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.Collection: Real
Contemplation is a luxury, requiring time and alternatives.Collection: Luxury
The forest did not tolerate frailty of body or mind. Show your weakness, and it would consume you without hesitation.Collection: Mind
Respect was one thing. Survival was another. It was important that I kept my priorities in the right order.Collection: Order
I felt sure we could gain the upper hand by putting ourselves in the mindset of the Incas.Collection: Hands
Calcutta's the only city I know where you are actively encouraged to stop strangers at random for a quick chat.Collection: Cities
I believe that Marrakech ought to be earned as a destination. The journey is the preparation for the experience. Reaching it too fast derides it, makes it a little less easy to understand.Collection: Believe
Believe, and what was impossible becomes possible what at first was hidden becomes visible.Collection: Believe
Money spent on good-quality gear is always money well spentCollection: Travel
My father used to say that stories are part of the most precious heritage of mankind.Collection: Father
There's nothing like a pack of mules to give one a sense of entourage.Collection: Giving
The first rule of an expedition is that everyone should stick together.Collection: Together
To Succeed, you must reach for the stars, and let your imagination find its own pathCollection: Stars
The taste for glory can make ordinary men behave in extraordinary ways.Collection: Men
Explorers like to pretend that they are a select breed of people with iron nerve and an ability to endure terrible hardship.Collection: Iron
For my father there was no sharper way to understand a country than by listening to its stories.Collection: Country
If hot food is they key to maintaining an expedition's stamina, then low grade gut-rot alcohol is the key to sustaining its sense of pleasure.Collection: Keys
Most journeys have a clear beginning, but on some the ending is less well-defined. The question is, at what point do you bite your lip and head for home?Collection: Travel
Enlightenment, and the death which comes before it, is the primary business of Varanasi.Collection: Enlightenment
Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.Collection: Journey
The desert was bad, but nothing could compare with the horrors of a tropical rain forest.Collection: Rain
The backstreet cafe in Casablanca was for me a place of mystery, a place with a soul, a place with danger. There was a sense that the safety nets had been cut away, that each citizen walked upon the high wire of this, the real world. I longed not merely to travel through it, but to live in such a city.Collection: Real
The pursuit of illusion is not about studying for prizes, or for study's sake. There's no right or wrong, no pass or fail.Collection: Sake
During the days I felt myself slipping into a kind of madness. Solitary confinement has an astonishing effect on the mind. The trip was to stay calm and keep myself occupied. I spent hours working out how to break free. But trying to escape would have been instant suicide.Collection: Suicide
The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after two minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.Collection: Travel
For me, nature is something you watch on the Discovery Channel, or on the evening news -- as you learn how much more of it's been savaged to make way for the Blackberry realm that is my homeCollection: Home
Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredomCollection: Reading
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.Collection: Book
There comes a stage at which a man would rather die cleanly by a bullet than by the unknown terror of the phantom in the forest.Collection: Fear
Spend sixteen weeks in the jungle and you being to question your own sanity, especially when you are the one goading everyone else ahead.Collection: Travel
To be selfless, you would give charity anonymously, walj softly on the earth, and look out for others-even total strangers-before you look out for yourself. For the Arab mind, the self is an obstacle, an impediment, in humanity's quest foe real progress.Collection: Real
A cross between a foreign legion boot-camp and a secret-society initiation ritual, the ordeals were grounded in pain. One thing was obvious: the agenda, which was dedicated to grave discomfort, had been drawn up by a passionate sadist.Collection: Pain
Searching for a lost city is a particularly European obsession.Collection: Cities
Foras Road has a sordid reputation (…) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution.Collection: Daughter
Stories are not like the real world; they aren't held back by what we know is false or true. What's important is how a story makes you feel inside.Collection: Real
Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood. With such a book the impact isn't necessarily obvious at first...but the more you read it and re-read it, and live with it, and travel with it, the more it speaks to you, and the more you realize that you cannot live without that book. It's then that the wisdom hidden inside, the seed, is passed on.Collection: Book
I was no longer troubled when he pulled out a machete in a crowded bar, tried to pick up schoolgirls, or threatened to scalp us, then rip off our heads and scoop out our brains.Collection: Fear
The Occident has never found it easy to grasp the strange netherworld of spirits that followers of Islam universally believe exist in a realm overlaid our own.Collection: Believe
The rain of Madre de Dios is similar to that of the Amazon, but there is a petrifying aspect to it, as if it seeks to wound rather than to nurture.Collection: Fear
There can be few situations more fearful than breaking down in darkness on the highway leading to Casablanca. I have rarely felt quite so vulnerable or alone.Collection: Fear
The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.Collection: Fire
Any man who has ever led an army, an expedition, or a group of Boy Scouts has sadism in his bones.Collection: Army
In India everything has a use and a value.Collection: India
There’s nothing quite like a good quest for getting your blood pumping.Collection: Travel
As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.Collection: Travel