Motivational Quotes

Travel

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

Best Quotes about Travel

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

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

Old men and far travelers may lie with authority.

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

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

Bardot, Brigitte

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

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

Hazlitt, William

10.

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

11.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

12.

The bigger the summer vacation the harder the fall.

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

The fool wanders, a wise man travels.

Fuller, Thomas

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Steinbeck, John

18.

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

19.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Nadelson, Regina

24.

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

25.

Travel is ninety percent anticipation and ten percent recollection.

Streeter, Edward

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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

Charles Kuralt

29.

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

30.

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

George Moore

31.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

32.

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

33.

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

Henry J. Tillman

34.

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

Burney, Fanny

35.

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

36.

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

Kuralt, Charles

37.

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

Thompson, Alice

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Beecham, Sir Thomas

41.

A wise traveler never depreciates their own country.

Goldoni, Carlo

42.

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.

43.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

44.

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

45.

The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.

Allen, Fred A.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

If my ship sails from sight, it doesn't mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends.

Powell, John Enoch

49.

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

50.

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