To Be Human

Conversations are at the heart of what it means to be human.
- Theodore Zeldin

Rajasthan, India
A boy listens as the elders talk at a traditional wedding festival.

India

The character of a man is known from his conversations.
Menander (342 BCE – 292 BCE)

Tibet

The most fruitful and natural exercise for our minds is, in my opinion, conversation.
- Michel de Montaigne, The Essays: A Selection

 Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris

The great gift of conversation lies less in displaying it ourselves
than in drawing it out of others.
- Jean De La Bruyere

 California, USA

Lebanon 

The true spirit of conversation consists in building on another man’s observation,
not overturning it.
- Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Yemen

Druze Elders, Lebanon

Golden Temple, Amritsar, India

Angkor Wat temple complex, Cambodia

When you have spoken the word, it reigns over you.
When it is unspoken you reign over it.
- Arab Proverb

Lourdes, France

Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee and just as hard to sleep after.
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

Brazil

Kashmir

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero

Kabul, Afghanistan

France

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing
at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.
- Dorothy Nevill

Russia

Thailand

Bursa, Turkey

A single conversation with a wise man is
better than ten years mere study of books.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Dublin, Ireland

Maimana, Afghanistan

Steve McCurry, Afghanistan

For information about Steve’s photographic expedition to Burma, please visit our website.
http://stevemccurry.com/expeditions/myanmar-expedition

Food for Thought

  Food is our common ground, a universal experience.
- James Beard

 Pul-e-Kumri, Afghanistan

Food is a central activity of mankind and one of the
single most significant trademarks of a culture.

- Mark Kurlansky

Burma

What is food to one man may be fierce poison to others.
- Lucretius, Roman Poet and Philosopher

Calcutta, India

Tibet

The smell of good bread baking, like the sound of lightly flowing water,
is indescribable in its evocation of innocence and delight…”
M.F.K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

Bakery run by widows, Kabul, Afghanistan

All sorrows are less with bread.
- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

Mauritania

If thou tastest a crust of bread, thou tastest all the stars  and all the heavens.
- Robert Browning

Croatia

Bread is the king of the table and all else is merely the
court that surrounds the king.
- Louis Bromfield

Afghanistan

Istanbul, Turkey

Food to a large extent is what holds a society together and
eating is closely linked to deep spiritual experiences.
- Peter Farb and George Armelagos
Consuming Passions: The Anthropology of Eating

Rajasthan, India

Egg Vendor, Kabul, Afghanistan

Chef Wolfgang Puck,  Los Angeles, California, USA

Date Seller, Yemen

Honduras

The table is a place of communion for life’s large and small events.
Art Smith, Master Chef

Peru

Vietnam

Refugee Family, Sri Lanka

It’s the company, not the cooking, that makes a meal.
- Kirby Larson, Hattie Big Sky

Cambodia

Priyadarshini Park, Mumbai, India

If more of us valued food and cheer above hoarded gold, it would be a much merrier world.
- J.R.R. Tolkien

Monsoon Waters, Indonesia

Beirut, Lebanon

Burma

Mumbai, India

The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.
- E.M. Forster

Just Write

Bamiyan, Afghanistan

Without words, without writing and without books
there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
- Hermann Hesse

Baluchistan, Pakistan

Writing  is one of the grand, free human activities.
-  Thomas E. Cronin

Yemen

Writing is both mask and unveiling.
- E.B. White

Mali

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.
- William Wordsworth

Kegalla, Sri Lanka

 Burma

Writing is thinking on paper.
- William Zinsser

 Kabul, Afghanistan

The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite…
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Honduras

Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.
- Jules Renard, Journal, 10 April 1895

India

Like most—maybe all— writers, I learned to write by writing and,
by example, by reading books.
- Francine Prose

Bruce Duffy, writer and author, working on an article for Life Magazine, Afghanistan

The pen is mightier than the sword.
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Dith Pran, survivor of Cambodia’s killing fields, photojournalist, and author of
Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors

Paul Theroux, writer and novelist, Costa Rica

Words so innocent and powerless as they are,
as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil
they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

Paraguay

Creative writing begins with creative thinking
- K. Earle

Colombia

Afghanistan

It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by.
- Vita Sackville-West

Thailand

Writing left by visitors to a pilgrimage site in Burma

Peru

The act of putting pen to paper encourages pause for thought,
this in turn makes us think more deeply about life … 
- Norbet Platt

Young Sikh boys in classroom, Afghanistan

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the
difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
- Mark Twain