quotations about travel
Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
PAUL THEROUX
introduction, The Best American Travel Writing
Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else -- above all, a travel bureau -- arrange everything before-hand?
RICHARD ALDINGTON
Death of a Hero
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Arrow of God
Our object in traveling should be, not to gratify curiosity, and seek mere temporary amusement, but to learn, and to venerate, to improve the understanding and the heart.
NIGEL GRESLEY
attributed, American Medical Association Bulletin, 1933
Travel is like death in that it requires separation and, indeed, mourning. And travel by sea, unlike the far more rapid air travel, gives time for mourning, separation, and loss as one sees space slowly open between ship and shore and watches the coastline recede and eventually disappear.
PHILIP H. PFATTEICHER
Liturgical Spirituality
Soulful travel is the art of finding beauty even in ruins.
PHIL COUSINEAU
The Art of Pilgrimage
I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it.
SIR THOMAS BEECHAM
attributed, The Quotable Traveler
A wise man travels to discover himself.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Fireside Travels
Travel is the soul of civilization.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
attributed, The Art of Pilgrimage
Travel is like knowledge. The more you see the more you know you haven't seen.
MARK HERTSGAARD
Earth Odyssey
A wise traveller never despises his own country.
CARLO GOLDONI
attributed, Day's Collacon
Voyaging great distances -- through forests, from island to island, across plains and into the mountains -- is all about finding ourselves.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.
ITALO CALVINO
Invisible Cities
Travel is one of the greatest facilitators of creation, if only because it forces us to observe other ways of creating things.
BLAKE SNOW
"Off The Grid: Why Do We Travel?", Paste Magazine, May 16, 2017
Travel is like a drug that permeates the mind with an indefinite but unusual tinge, stimulating and releasing, imparting a greater significance than they possess to the things that interest and amuse it.
OSBERT SITWELL
Discursions on Travel, Art, and Life
Those who visit foreign nations, but who associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs; they ... return home with travelled bodies, but untravelled minds.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Voyage of the Beagle
Better sit still where born, I say,
Wed one sweet woman and love her well,
Love and be loved in the old East way,
Drink sweet waters, and dream in a spell,
Than to wander in search of the Blessed Isles,
And to sail the thousands of watery miles
In search of love, and find you at last
On the edge of the world, and a curs'd outcast.
JOAQUIN MILLER
Pace Implora
The soul of the journey is liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk