Motivational Quotes

Travel

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

- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Best Quotes about Travel

Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse

Fuller, Thomas

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

Nadelson, Regina

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.

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

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

Proverb

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

George Santayana

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

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

Steinbeck, John

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Theroux, 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.

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

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

15.

When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.

Dahlberg, Edward

16.

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

Johnson, Samuel

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

The Dhammapada

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Debord, Guy

23.

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

Goldsmith, Oliver

24.

A solitary traveler can sleep from state to state, from day to night, from day to day, in the long womb of its controlled interior. It is the cradle that never stops rocking after the lullaby is over. It is the biggest sleeping tablet in the world, and no one need ever swallow the pill, for it swallows them.

Teran, Lisa St. Aubin De

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Ewing, Sam

31.

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

Cooley, Mason

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Being on tour sends me crazy, I drink too much and out comes the John Mcenroe in me.

Hynde, Chrissie

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Powell, John Enoch

43.

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

44.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

45.

My favorite thing is to go where I have never gone.

Arbus, Diane

46.

If you look like your passport picture you're too ill to travel.

Kommen, Will

47.

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.

48.

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

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.

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

Colette