“All good trips,” travel writer Pico Iyer reflected, “are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.”
I’d have to admit, when I travel I fall in love again and again with each new destination; opening my mind, body and soul to the experience can be terrifying. Iyer summarized my love affair best in his 2000 Salon post, “Why We Travel.”
“For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament.”
The answers to that "why" are as plentiful as there are people. I offer you a collection of my favorite travel quotes and photos devoted to those answers.
“Half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness.”
― Ray Bradbury
I’d have to admit, when I travel I fall in love again and again with each new destination; opening my mind, body and soul to the experience can be terrifying. Iyer summarized my love affair best in his 2000 Salon post, “Why We Travel.”
“For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with. All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament.”
The answers to that "why" are as plentiful as there are people. I offer you a collection of my favorite travel quotes and photos devoted to those answers.
“Half the fun of the travel is the aesthetic of lostness.”
― Ray Bradbury
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“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine
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“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson
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“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
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“Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.”
― Isabelle Eberhardt, The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
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“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
– Jack Kerouac
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“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”
– Lin Yutang
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“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
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“Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.”
— Lawrence Block
“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.”
– Jack Kerouac
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“No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.”
– Lin Yutang
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“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
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“Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.”
— Lawrence Block
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“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson
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“Traveling 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
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“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
– Henry Miller
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“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
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“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
– Andre Gide
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“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
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“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
– Martin Buber
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"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."
― Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters
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“To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.”
– Bill Bryson
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“There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.”
– Charles Dudley Warner
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“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
– Lao Tzu
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“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
― Scott Cameron
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“A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.”
– Tim Cahill
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“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”
– Pat Conroy
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“Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.”
– Benjamin Disraeli
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“Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and celebrate the journey.”
– Fitzhugh Mullan
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“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”
– Maya Angelou
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“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.”
– James Michener
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“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
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“I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.”
– Steve McQueen
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“Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.”
– Anatole France
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“Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”
– Seneca
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“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
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“Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.”
– Charles Kuralt
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“I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.”
– Lillian Smith
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“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
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“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”
– Rudyard Kipling
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“A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.”
— Moslih Eddin Saadi
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“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
– Paul Theroux
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“Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.”
– Mark Jenkins
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“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can't read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can't even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.”
― Bill Bryson, Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe
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“Not all those who wander are lost.”
– J.R.R. Tolkien
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“Personally I like going places where I don't speak the language, don't know anybody, don't know my way around and don't have any delusions that I'm in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home.”
― Michael Mewshaw
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“I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.”
― Mary Anne Radmacher
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“Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.”
– Paul Theroux
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“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”
– Helen Keller
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“Take only memories, leave only footprints.”
– Chief Seattle
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“If God had really intended men to fly, he’d make it easier to get to the airport”.
– George Winters
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“Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel’s immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad new sights, smells and sounds, but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way.”
– Ralph Crawshaw
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“If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.”
– Cesare Pavese
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“It is only in adventure that some people succeed in knowing themselves – in finding themselves.”
– Andre Gide
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“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.”
– Richard Burton
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“People who don’t travel cannot have a global view, all they see is what’s in front of them. Those people cannot accept new things because all they know is where they live.”
– Martin Yan
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“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
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“A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car.”
– Emile Ganest
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
– Mark Twain
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“Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.”
– Mohammed
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"A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."
– John A. Shedd
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“I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”
– Hilaire Belloc
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“Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.”
— Peter Hoeg
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“I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education.”
– David Rockefeller
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“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
– Marcel Proust
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“One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.”
– Andre Gide
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“The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin
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“When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.”
– Susan Heller
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“NOT I – NOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you; you must travel it for yourself.”
– Walt Whitman
– Susan Heller
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“NOT I – NOT ANYONE else, can travel that road for you; you must travel it for yourself.”
– Walt Whitman
