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

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

Horace

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.

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

Benchley, Robert

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

Sinclair, Iain

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

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

Ewing, Sam

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

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

The map is not the territory.

Korzybski, Alfred

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Powell, John Enoch

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Thompson, Alice

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Hazlitt, William

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Travel is a fools paradise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

26.

The bigger the summer vacation the harder the fall.

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Steinbeck, John

31.

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

Charles Kuralt

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.

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

Burney, Fanny

34.

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

35.

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

Daney, Serge

36.

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

Twain, Mark

37.

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

George Santayana

38.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

39.

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

40.

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

Proverb

41.

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

42.

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

Debord, Guy

43.

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

George Moore

44.

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

Johnson, Samuel

45.

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

46.

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

Burton, Sir Richard

47.

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

48.

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.

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.

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

Huxley, Aldous