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Collected Quotes
- "Unusual travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."
- Kurt Vonnegut
- "The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."
- Samuel Johnson
- "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes."
- Marcel Proust
- ". . .and performing our one and noble function of the time, move."
- Jack Kerouac
- ". . . I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart."
- Colette
- ". . . the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself."
- William Least Heat Moon (William Trogdon)
- "He who does not travel does not know the value of men."
- Moorish proverb
- "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."
- Helen Keller
- "Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death."
- Pascal, Pensées
- "Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating."
- Michael Crichton
- "Internal burning . . . wandering fever . . ."
- Kalevala
- "If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things."
- Henry Miller
- "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.
Explore. Dream. Discover."
- Mark Twain
- "Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns."
- Paul Fussell
- "If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears."
- Glenn Clark
- "Eat dessert first
Life is uncertain"
- Anonymous
- "There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as though everything is a miracle."
- Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
- "Better to be known as a sinner than a hypocrite."
- Anonymous
- ". . .If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another."
- Paul Bowles
- "A study of the Great Malady; horror of home."
- Baudelair, Journaux Intimes
- "Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe."
- Anatole France
- "When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in. . ."
- D. H. Lawrence
- ". . .life is short and the world is wide"
- Simon Raven
- "When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. . . In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable."
- John Steinbeck
- "Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.'"
- Lisa St. Aubin de Teran
- ". . .the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home."
- Paul Theroux
- "All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time."
- Paul Fussell
- "To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries."
- Aldous Huxley
- "I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad"
- George Bernard Shaw
- ". . .wherever one is, some part of oneself remains on another continent."
- Dame Margot Fonteyn
- "To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world."
- Freya Stark
- "Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent."
- Margot Fonteyn
- ". . .travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."
- Miriam Beard
- "I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine."
- Caskie Stinnett
- "Better far off to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen and to see well the rest; to see them not once, but again and often again; to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till they have become a part of life and life's recollections."
- Augustus Hare
- "We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment."
- Hilaire Belloc
- "When you are everywhere, you are nowhere.
When you are somewhere, you are everywhere."
- Rumi
- "There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveler. Therefore wander!"
- Aitarey Brahmana
- "So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge."
- Samuel Johnson 1709-84: in James Boswell Life of Johnson (1791)
- "A man travels the world in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."
- George Moore 1852-1933: the Brook Kerith
- "All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it."
- Samuel Johnson
- "Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art."
- Freya Stark
- "Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name."
- Alice Meynell
- "Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel."
- Francis Bacon 1561-1626: Essays (1625) 'Of Travel'
- "Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There's no looking at a building after seeing Italy."
- Fanny Burney
[ Top ]
- "All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost"
- J. R. R. Tolkien "Lord of the Rings"
- "When you're traveling, ask the traveler for advice,
not someone whose lameness keeps him in one place."
- Rumi
- "Old men and far travelers may lie with authority."
- Anonymous
- "Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds."
- Caleb Colton
- "That same preface also contains a single line that really does sum everything up: 'Some other places were not so good but maybe we were not so good when we were in them.'"
- Jeff Greenwald - Big World dispatch #20
- "All the above is, of course, a gross simplification. There are deeper reasons to travel - itches and tickles on the underbelly of the unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we're doing there."
- Jeff Greenwald "Shopping for Buddhas"
- "There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- "The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. "
- Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
- "Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone."
- The Dhammapada
- "The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
- "Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."
- Paul Theroux
- "A traveler must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing."
- Thomas Nashe (1567-1601)
- "For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort."
- Aldous Huxley - "Along the Road"
- "The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time."
- Colette, Paris From My Window, 1944
- "Muhammad says, 'Love of one's country is a part of the faith.'
But don't take that literally! Your real 'country' is where you're heading, not where you are.
Don't misread that hadith."
- Rumi
- "He gave the impression that very many cities had rubbed him smooth."
- Graham Greene
- "Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember; and I remember more than I have seen."
- Benjamin Disraeli
- "If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home."
- James A. Michener
- "A good traveler has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving."
- Lao Tzu
- "He should be endowed with an active, indefatigable vigor of mind and body, which can. . . support, with a careless smile, every hardship of the road, the weather, or the inn."
- Edward Gibbon (1760) on the qualifications for a traveler
- "Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest."
- The late modernist painter Georgia O'Keeffe, in an introduction to her work displayed on a newly opened museum dedicated to her art in New Mexico.
- "Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure."
- Aldous Huxley
- "[The tourist] debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; . . .avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries. . . But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow."
- Evelyn Waugh on the tourist
- "The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother."
- Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad
- "Of all noxious animals, too, the most noxious is a tourist. And of all tourists the most vulgar, ill bred, offensive and loathsome is the British tourist."
- Francis Kilvert 1840-94 diary
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- "Trust in Allah, but tie your camel."
- Old Muslim Proverb
- "A good holiday is one that is spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours."
- J. B. Priestley
- "I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them."
- Mark Twain
- "There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be travelling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love."
- Cyril Connolly
- "What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do -- especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road."
- William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways
- "Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity"
- Eric Hoffer
[ Top ]
- "The journey not the arrival matters."
- T.S. Eliot
- "The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it."
- T.S. Eliot
- "Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it."
- Cesare Pavese
- "I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed's dictum, 'A journey is a fragment of Hell.'"
- Bruce Chatwin "The Songlines"
- "The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped."
- Graham Greene
- "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- "A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it."
- John Steinbeck
- "When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable."
- Clifton Fadiman
- "Remember that happiness is a way of travel - not a destination."
- Roy M. Goodman
- "Once in a while it really hits people that they don't have to experience the world in the way they have been told to."
- Alan Keightley
- "Every exit is an entry somewhere else."
- Tom Stoppard
- "The fastest way to travel is to be there already."
- Terry Pratchett
- "It is not down in any map; true places never are."
- Herman Melville
- "The first experience can never be repeated. The first love, the first sun-rise, the first South Sea Island, are memories apart, and touched a virginity of sense."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- "Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock."
- Anne Morrow Lindbergh
- ". . .Destination is merely a byproduct of the journey."
- Eric Hansen
- "Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen."
- Louis L'Amour
- "What am I doing here?"
- Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia
- "All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
- Martin Buber
- "It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places."
- Paul Theroux
- "For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints."
- Robert Louis Stevenson
- "There is nothing like a comfortable adventure to put people in a good humor. . ."
- Peter Mayle
- "Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think."
- Lawrence Durrell
- "There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument."
- Thomas Gray (1739) on viewing the Alps
- "One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy."
- Sir Richard Burton
- "He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all."
- Sinclair Lewis on sightseeing
- ". . .I have learned that the cost of everything from a royal suite to a bottle of soda water can be halved by the simple expedient of saying it must be halved."
- Robert Byron, on bargaining in the Middle East, The Road to Oxiana, 1933
- "Here [the tourist] is still an aberration. If you can come from London to Syria on business, you must be rich. If you can come so far without business, you must be very rich. No one cares if you like the place, or hate it, or why. You are simply a tourist, as a skunk is a skunk, a parasitic variation of the human species, which exists to be tapped like a milch cow or a gum tree."
- Robert Byron, on travel in Syria, The Road to Oxiana, 1933
- "People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home."
- Dagobert D. Runes, US writer
- "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's aware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey's over there'll be time enough to sleep."
- A.E. Housman 1859-1936: A Shropshire Lad
- "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."
- Douglas Adams
[ Top ]
- "We are a plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can't think what anybody sees in them!"
- Bilbo to Gandalf on their first meeting
- "Ah, if I had known this was my last time here I would have stayed a little longer - savored it a little more."
- Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey
- "Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?"
- Peter Matthiessen
- "It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on the journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be."
- Selma Lagerlof
- "It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home."
- Rumi
- "If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil."
- Sinclair Lewis on the toil of travel
- "An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys."
- Iain Sinclair
- "The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
Let others follow it who can!
Let them a journey new begin,
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet."
- J.R.R Tolkien
- "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land;
it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
- G. K. Chesterton
- "I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."
- Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey
- "One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind."
- Charles Dickens
- "Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those."
- Mark Twain
[ Top ]
- "But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. . ."
- Mark Twain, on experienced travelers
- "It is far easier to travel than to write about it."
- David Livingstone
- "Journal writing is a voyage to the interior."
- Christina Baldwin
- "And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach. Inside every good travel writer there is a pedagogue - often a highly moral pedagogue - struggling to get out."
- Paul Fussell
- "Anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, . . . for if a traveler doesn't visit his narrative with the spirit and techniques of fiction, no one will want to hear it."
- Paul Fussell
- "We travellers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic."
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
- "The only aspect of our travels that is interesting to others is disaster."
- Martha Gellman
- "In discussing these exceptions from the course of nature, the first question is, whether the fact be justly stated. That which is strange is delightful, and a pleasing error is not willingly detected."
- Samuel Johnson, on fidelity to truth in travelers' tales
- "The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination."
- Alexander Cockburn
- "Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong."
- Vita Sackville-West
- ". . .the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited."
- Evelyn Waugh, on the properties of a good travel writer (speaking of Eric Newby)
[ Top ]
- "If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries."
- Paul Fussell, on guidebooks
- "[This handbook] is intended to supply the traveler with such information as will render him as nearly as possible independent of hotel-keepers, commissionnaires, and guides, and thus enable him the more thoroughly to enjoy and appreciate the objects of interest he meets with on his tour."
- Excerpt from a traveler's handbook
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- "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."
- John Muir
- "On a long journey even a straw weighs heavy."
- Spanish proverb
- "He who would travel happily must travel light."
- St. Exupery
- "We found in the course of our journey the convenience of having disencumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight will burden; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself."
- Samuel Johnson, on packing for travel
- "Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order."
- Katherine Mansfield 1888-1923 diary
- "I travel light; as light, that is, as a man can travel who will still carry his body around because of its sentimental value."
- Christopher Fry (b.1970) British playwright
[ Top ]
- "Travel is the realm of the improbable adventure, the quick fix, the ship passing in the night. It entitles you to meet interesting people, whom you would never meet, even if you laid traps or advertised for them. Not only do you meet them, but also unmeet them, all in the space of, it often seems, a mere compacted evening. As there is so little time, bodies in motion drop their guard and immediatly get on with their stories. Then the proverbial ships part, each to its destination, never again to brush each other's wake."
- Lawrence Millman, "Last Places"
- "These spiritual windowshoppers,
who idly ask, 'How much is that?' Oh, I'm just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down,
shadows with no capital.What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop. Where did you go? 'Nowhere.'
What did you have to eat? 'Nothing much.' Even if you don't know what you want,
buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow. Start a huge, foolish project,
like Noah. It makes absolutely no difference
what people think of you."
- Rumi
- "A year to go around the world! A whole twelve months of scenes and curious happenings in far-off foreign lands! You have thought of doing this, almost promised yourself that when you got old enough, and rich enough, and could "spare the time," you too would go around the world. Most of us get old enough; some of us get rich enough; but the time! the time! - to spare the time, to cut loose from goods and lands, from stocks and dreary desks, quit clients, patients, readers, home and friends - ay, and our enemies whom we so dearly love! Full many a promise must be broken and few the voyagers round the world."
- D.N. Richardson, "A Girdle Round the Earth", 1888
- "In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as [brazilwood and pepper, which] added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity. . .[From] these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales."
- Claude Levi-Strauss on the motivation of travel
- "On the need to travel
After living a long time in one place and in the same rut, I feel that for a certain time it is enough, that I must refresh myself with other horizons and other faces. . . and at the same time must retire into myself, strange as that sounds. The superficial distractions of the journey do not interfere. There are people who prefer to get away inwardly, some with the help of a powerful imagination and an ability to abstract themselves from their surroundings (for this a special endowment is needed, bordering on genius and insanity), some with the help of opium or alcohol. Russians, for instance, will have a drinking bout for a week or two, and then go back to their homes and duties. I prefer shifting my whole body to shifting my brain, and going round the world to letting my head go round. Perhaps it is because I have a bad head after too much to drink."
- Alexander Herzen (1812 - 1870)
- "Mornings, everywhere in the world, take their own peculiar rhythms; carefully etched compromises between the body's perpetual reluctance and civilization's unflagging persistence. My experience in Kathmandu was no exception.
Wake up for the first time at 5:15 in the morning to the crunch of army boots on loose gravel, and hoarse crowing. The troops from the Police Training Academy just down the block have begun their morning march, rousing the neighborhood roosters. Cram head between pillows; fall back to sleep. Wake up for the second time at precisely 6:30 a.m. to the ceaseless, strident ringing of a puja bell, accompanied by guttural chants: an anonymous neighbor is conducting his morning ritual. By now the sky is lightening. Within another thirty minutes the morning commute has begun, roaring and honking around the blind corner some six meters from my bedroom window. No more sleeping after this."
- Jeff Greenwald "Shopping for Buddhas"
- "Back home in the Wild West, time whips by with the relentless and terrible purpose of a stranglevine vine filmed in fast motion. A week, two months, ten years snap past like amnesia, a continual barrage of workdays, appointments, dinner dates and laundromats, television shows and video cassettes, parking meters, paydays and phone calls.
You can watch it from Asia. You read the newspapers, you think about your friends back home - marching along in the parade of events - and you know it's still happening. It's happening there. On the other side. Yesterdays, todays and tomorrows are tumbling after each other like Sambo and the tiger, blending into an opaque and viscous ooze. There is no such thing as now; only a continual succession of laters, whipping their tendrils around the calendar. The clutches of the vine. . . In Nepal, the phenomenon is reversed. Time is a stick of incense that burns without being consumed. One day can seem like a week; a week, like months. Mornings stretch out and crack their spines with the yogic impassivity of house cats. Afternoons bulge with a succulent ripeness, like fat peaches. There is time enough to do everything - write a letter, eat breakfast, read the paper, visit a shrine or two, listen to the birds, bicycle downtown to change money, buy postcards, shop for Buddhas - and arrive home in time for lunch."
- Jeff Greenwald "Shopping for Buddhas"
- "He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the horses are sluggish, and the postilion brutal. He longs for the time of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he expected."
- Samuel Johnson
- "[The traveler] may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or dangers, excepting in rare cases, nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipates. In a moral point of view, the effect ought to be, to teach him good-humored patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence. . . Traveling ought also to teach him distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance."
- Charles Darwin
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- "Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."
- Miriam Beard
- "Charity is always help that is offered too late, just as revolution is help that is offered too soon."
- John Krich.
- "Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life."
- Jack Kerouac
- "The autumn leaves are falling like rain,
Although my neighbors are all barbarians,
And you, you are a thousand miles away,
There are always two cups at my table"
- T'ang Dynasty
- "Travel, instead of broadening the mind, often merely lengthens the conversation."
- Elizabeth Drew
- "Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- "The map is not the territory."
- Alfred Korzybski
- "Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."
- Paul Theroux
- "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."
- Yogi Berra
- "It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' exist."
- Douglas Adams, "Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul"
- "He won't fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won't fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation."
- Spalding Gray
- ". . . people don't take trips--trips take people."
- John Steinbeck
- "I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list."
- Susan Sontag
- "Jet lag is for amateurs."
- Dick Clark
- "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a cash advance."
- Anonymous
- "Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!"
- Bob Dylan
- "Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage."
- Regina Nadelson
- "I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience -- and laughter."
- Susan M. Watkins
- "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train."
- Oscar Wilde
- "There may be nothing sadder than people who spend their lives talking about what might have been."
- Anonymous
- "Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams."
- Mary Ellen Kelly
- "The only way to be sure of catching a train is to miss the one before it."
- G.K. Chesterton
- "[Travel]. . .that gregarious passion which destroys the object of its love."
- Patrick Leigh Femor
- "Competition was brisk; a survival of the weakest."
- John Krich, on beggars in India
- "I think it would be a good idea."
- Mahatma Ghandi (1869-1948), when asked what he thought of Western civilization
- "Worth seeing, yes; but not worth going to see."
- Samuel Johnson of the Giant's Causeway in James Boswell Life of Johnson.
- "There is no such thing as 'the Queen's English'. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!"
- Mark Twain, on English
- "An American diplomat is sometimes like a bull who carries his own china shop around with him."
- Winston Churchill
- "Travel - to go, move or journey from one place to another."
- Anonymous
- "Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation."
- Elizabeth Drew, US writer
- "It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest."
- Stendhal, on travel
- "We should consider every day lost in which we do not Dance at least once"
- Nietzsche
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