Motivational Quotes

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

Best Quotes about Travel

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

George Santayana

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.

The bigger the summer vacation the harder the fall.

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

Does this boat go to Europe, France?

Loos, Anita

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

Dylan, Bob

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

The fool wanders, a wise man travels.

Fuller, Thomas

Travel is ninety percent anticipation and ten percent recollection.

Streeter, Edward

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

16.

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

17.

Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse

Fuller, Thomas

18.

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

Henry J. Tillman

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

A wise traveler never depreciates their own country.

Goldoni, Carlo

25.

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

26.

The map is not the territory.

Korzybski, Alfred

27.

Old men and far travelers may lie with authority.

28.

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

Thompson, Alice

29.

Travel is only glamorous in retrospect.

Paul Theroux

30.

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

Thoreau, Henry David

31.

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

32.

Travel is a fools paradise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

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

Debord, Guy

34.

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

35.

Delillo, Don

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Burton, Sir Richard

39.

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

Johnson, Samuel

40.

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

Nadelson, Regina

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Huxley, Aldous

45.

The personal appropriation of clich?s is a condition for the spread of cultural tourism.

Daney, Serge

46.

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

The Dhammapada

47.

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

Colette

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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