Motivational Quotes

Travel

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

Best Quotes about Travel

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans --which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Eliot, George

In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

Runcie, Robert

I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.

Bardot, Brigitte

In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Johnson, Samuel

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

Thurber, James

There is no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.

Burney, Fanny

Before he sets out, the traveler must possess fixed interests and facilities to be served by travel.

George Santayana

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

Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.

Nadelson, Regina

14.

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

Wilde, Oscar

15.

We travelers 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.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

16.

The saying "Getting there is half the fun" became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines.

Henry J. Tillman

17.

A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is a vagabond.

Goldsmith, Oliver

18.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Paul Theroux

19.

Traveling makes a man wiser, but less happy.

Jefferson, Thomas

20.

If it's tourist season, why can't we kill them?

21.

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

Twain, Mark

22.

Visits always give pleasure; if not the arrival, the departure.

Proverb

23.

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.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

24.

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

25.

The average tourist wants to go to places where there are no tourists.

Ewing, Sam

26.

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

27.

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

28.

The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.

Cooley, Charles Horton

29.

Those that say you can't take it with you never saw a car packed for a vacation trip.

30.

What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?

Bishop, Elisabeth

31.

Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

Sontag, Susan

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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.

Calvino, Italo

36.

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

Lawrence, D. H.

37.

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

Cooley, Mason

38.

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

39.

As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.

Oliphant, Margaret

40.

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

41.

The map is not the territory.

Korzybski, Alfred

42.

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

Charles Kuralt

43.

A wise traveler never depreciates their own country.

Goldoni, Carlo

44.

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

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

46.

A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

47.

Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.

Kuralt, Charles

48.

The bigger the summer vacation the harder the fall.

49.

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