• Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.

• “A man is rich,” he wrote in Walden, “in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”

• Indeed, the surest way to miss out on the genuine experience of a foreign place—the psychic equivalent of trapping yourself back at home—is to obsessively check your e-mail as you travel from place to place.

• because of the Pyramids, for example, and end up staying there three extra months for completely unrelated reasons (Arabic poetry; belly-dancing lessons; or a desert love affair with a Hungarian archaeologist).

• Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time.

• The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you.

• The key in all of this is to trust chance, and to steer it in such a way that you’re always learning from it.

• Dare yourself to do simple things you normally wouldn’t consider—whether this means exploring a random canyon, taking up an invitation to dine with a stranger, or just stopping all activity to experience a moment more fully.

• “Good people keep walking whatever happens,” taught the Buddha.

• “They do not speak vain words and are the same in good fortune and bad.”

• The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances.

• Learn to treasure your worst experiences as gripping (if traumatic) new chapters in the epic novel that is your life.

• ‘So this is what an earthquake is like,’ and it gives them pleasure to have their knowledge of the world increased by this new item.”

• In maintaining this open attitude toward misadventure, of course, it’s important that you don’t get carried away and inadvertently seek misadventure. It’s wise, for example, to keep a positive, adventuresome spirit while you endure malaria (as I did once, in a Bangkok hospital), but it’s foolish to invite such a misadventure through sloppy health habits. In the same way, getting robbed (as I was once, in Istanbul) might be rationalized afterward as part of the grand drama of travel, but it’s stupid to let your theft defenses go soft merely to keep things interesting.

• “Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly,”

• The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they really are.

• This difference between looking and seeing on the road is frequently summed up with two somewhat opposable terms: tourist and traveler.

• Powerful men do not necessarily make the most eminent travelers; it is rather those who take the most interest in their work that succeed the best; as a huntsman says, “It is the nose that gives speed to the hound.” —FRANCIS GALTON, THE ART OF TRAVEL

• The Ecclesiastes of the Hebrew tradition asserts that “a live dog is better off than a dead lion,” because God favors what you do now. Islam asserts that the sacred is never separate from the secular, and that the world itself has spiritual lessons to teach.

• Encounters such as this will make you realize why travel should always be a personally motivated undertaking. Try as you might, you simply can’t make the social rewards of travel match up to the private discoveries. In sharing your road experiences, then, remember to keep your stories short and save the best bits for yourself. “I swear I see what is better than to tell the best,” wrote Walt Whitman. “It is always to leave the best untold.”