Motivational Quotes

Travel

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

Best Quotes about Travel

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

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

A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.

Kundera, Milan

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

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

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

Burton, Sir Richard

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.

Sackville-West, Vita

The fool wanders, a wise man travels.

Fuller, Thomas

10.

Traveling is not just seeing the new; it is also leaving behind. Not just opening doors; also closing them behind you, never to return. But the place you have left forever is always there for you to see whenever you shut your eyes.

Myrdal, Jan

11.

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

Cooley, Mason

12.

Every year it takes less time to fly across the Atlantic and more time to drive to the office.

13.

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

Colette

14.

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.

15.

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

Debord, Guy

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

The Dhammapada

19.

An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.

Sinclair, Iain

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Paul Theroux

23.

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

Twain, Mark

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the roads and accommodations.

Goldsmith, Oliver

27.

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

Arbus, Diane

28.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

29.

The alternative to a vacation is to stay home and tip every third person you see.

30.

Being on tour sends me crazy, I drink too much and out comes the John Mcenroe in me.

Hynde, Chrissie

31.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Proverb

35.

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

Henry J. Tillman

36.

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

Horace

37.

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

38.

Travel is a fools paradise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

39.

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

Thompson, Alice

40.

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

41.

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

Cockburn, Alexander

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

George Santayana

45.

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

46.

Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse

Fuller, Thomas

47.

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

48.

The bigger the summer vacation the harder the fall.

49.

The map is not the territory.

Korzybski, Alfred

50.

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.

Baudelaire, Charles