Motivational Quotes

Travel

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

- Cockburn, Alexander

Best Quotes about Travel

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

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

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

Johnson, Samuel

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Kuralt, Charles

10.

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

Sinclair, Iain

11.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Paul Theroux

15.

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

Horace

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Burton, Sir Richard

19.

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

20.

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

21.

Travel is ninety percent anticipation and ten percent recollection.

Streeter, Edward

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Twain, Mark

25.

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

Cockburn, Alexander

26.

Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

Dylan, Bob

27.

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

28.

A wise traveler never depreciates their own country.

Goldoni, Carlo

29.

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

Steinbeck, John

30.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Theroux, Paul

31.

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

Runcie, Robert

32.

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.

33.

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

Ade, George

34.

Old men and far travelers may lie with authority.

35.

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

36.

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

Thompson, Alice

37.

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

The Dhammapada

38.

The map is not the territory.

Korzybski, Alfred

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.

The bigger the summer vacation the harder the fall.

41.

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

42.

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

Nadelson, Regina

43.

The fool wanders, a wise man travels.

Fuller, Thomas

44.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Hemingway, Ernest

45.

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

46.

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

Hazlitt, William

47.

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

Ewing, Sam

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Powell, John Enoch