Motivational Quotes

Travel

To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.

- Delillo, Don

Best Quotes about Travel

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.

Huxley, Aldous

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.

Durrell, Lawrence

One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come up to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you are standing there, you are going to end up with an earful of cider.

Runyon, Damon

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.

Steinbeck, John

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

Thoreau, Henry David

Does this boat go to Europe, France?

Loos, Anita

The traveler, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.

Bennett, Arnold

I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

10.

The map is not the territory.

Korzybski, Alfred

11.

Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse

Fuller, Thomas

12.

Inter-railers are the ambulatory equivalent of Macdonald's, walking testimony to the erosion of French culture.

Thompson, Alice

13.

Travel only with thy equals or thy betters; if there are none, travel alone.

The Dhammapada

14.

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from coast to coast without seeing anything.

Charles Kuralt

15.

It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.

Frame, Janet

16.

Without stirring abroad, one can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window one can see the way of heaven. The further one goes the less one knows.

Lao-Tzu

17.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost --the lost valleys of the imagination.

Cockburn, Alexander

18.

I would like to spend my whole life traveling, if I could borrow another life to spend at home.

Hazlitt, William

19.

Old men and far travelers may lie with authority.

20.

The routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life.

Cooley, Mason

21.

I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring.

Byron, Lord

22.

The true traveler is he who goes on foot, and even then, he sits down a lot of the time.

Colette

23.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.

Wilde, Oscar

24.

Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.

Burroughs, John

25.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

Dahlberg, Edward

26.

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

Johnson, Samuel

27.

Travel is a fools paradise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

Raban, Jonathan

29.

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

Gordimer, Nadine

30.

I was disappointed in Niagara -- most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.

Wilde, Oscar

31.

The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack.

Ade, George

32.

If you look like your passport picture you're too ill to travel.

Kommen, Will

33.

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

Horace

34.

Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives -- from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango -- with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists stage.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

35.

Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.

Burton, Sir Richard

36.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.

Goodman, Paul

38.

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

The fool wanders, a wise man travels.

Fuller, Thomas

40.

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

Lerner, Max

41.

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.

Twain, Mark

42.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Paul Theroux

43.

Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel --movement through space --provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions --perhaps one of the secret terrors --of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

44.

Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

Debord, Guy

45.

My favorite thing is to go where I have never gone.

Arbus, Diane

46.

Travelling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.

Teran, Lisa St. Aubin De

47.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres?

Bishop, Elisabeth

48.

Of journeying the benefits are many: the freshness it bringeth to the heart, the seeing and hearing of marvelous things, the delight of beholding new cities, the meeting of unknown friends, and the learning of high manners.

Gulistan, Sadi

49.

Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.

Lawrence, D. H.

50.

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.

Miller, Henry