Motivational Quotes

Travel

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

Best Quotes about 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

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

The Dhammapada

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

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

Cooley, Mason

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

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

The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.

Boorstin, Daniel J.

He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the horses are sluggish. He longs for the time of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he expected.

Johnson, Samuel

The fool wanders, a wise man travels.

Fuller, Thomas

10.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Steinbeck, John

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Henry J. Tillman

18.

He travels best that knows when to return. Middleton For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

19.

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

Burton, Sir Richard

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.

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

Nadelson, Regina

22.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

23.

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

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.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Paul Theroux

26.

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

Johnson, Samuel

27.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

28.

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

Proverb

29.

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

George Santayana

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Does this boat go to Europe, France?

Loos, Anita

34.

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

Burney, Fanny

35.

I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.

Byron, Lord

36.

The map is not the territory.

Korzybski, Alfred

37.

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

Kuralt, Charles

38.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Theroux, Paul

39.

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

40.

In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children.

Benchley, Robert

41.

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

Hazlitt, William

42.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Huxley, Aldous

43.

Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse

Fuller, Thomas

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

Bardot, Brigitte

47.

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.

48.

Traveling makes a man wiser, but less happy.

Jefferson, Thomas

49.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

50.

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