Travel Quotes

"If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears." -Glenn Clark

"Eat dessert first, Life is uncertain" -Anonymous

"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." -Robert Louis Stevenson

"If you come to a fork in the road, take it." -Yogi Berra

"Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; Breath's aware that will not keep. Up, lad: when the journey's over then there'll be time enough to sleep." -A.E. Housman 1859-1936: A Shropshire Lad

"A good traveller has no fixed plan and is not intent on arriving." -Lao Tzu

"Tourists don't know where they've been, travellers don't know where they're going." -Paul Theroux

"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world." -Freya Stark

"The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality.. -Samuel Johnson

"Your true traveller 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." -Aldous Huxley

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes." -Marcel Proust

"I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart." -Colette

" the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself." -William Least Heat Moon (William Trogdon)

A good holiday is one that is spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours." -J. B. Priestley

"I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them." -Mark Twain

"He who does not travel does not know the value of men." -Moorish proverb

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart." -Helen Keller

"Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death." -Pascal, Pensées

"Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating." -Michael Crichton

"Internal burning . . . wandering fever . . ." -Kalevala

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." -Mark Twain

"Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travellers . . . seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns." -Paul Fussell
"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle." -Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

"Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe." -Anatole France

"When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don't know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in. . ." -D. H. Lawrence

". . .life is short and the world is wide" -Simon Raven

"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.'" -Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

". . .the grand tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home." -Paul Theroux

"All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveller learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time." -Paul Fussell
"To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries." -Aldous Huxley

"I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad" -George Bernard Shaw

". . .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

"I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine." -Caskie Stinnett

"We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment." -Hilaire Belloc

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life." -Jack Kerouac

"When you are everywhere, you are nowhere. When you are somewhere, you are everywhere." -Rumi

"Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art." -Freya Stark

"Travelling is the ruin of all happiness! There's no looking at a sunset after seeing Italy." -Fanny Burney

"What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do -- especially in other people's minds. When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road." -William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

"The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it." -Rudyard Kipling

"All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost" -J. R. R. Tolkien "Lord of the Rings"

Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it." -Cesare Pavese

"Old men and far travellers may lie with authority." -Anonymous

"Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with travelled bodies, but untravelled minds." -Caleb Colton

"There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign." -Robert Louis Stevenson

"The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. "
-Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

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

"The traveller sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see." -Gilbert K. Chesterton

"A traveller must have the back of an ass to bear all, a tongue like the tail of a dog to flatter all, the mouth of a hog to eat what is set before him, the ear of a merchant to hear all and say nothing." -Thomas Nashe (1567-1601)

"For the born traveller, travelling is a besetting vice. Like other vices, it is imperious, demanding its victim's time, money, energy and the sacrifice of comfort." -Aldous Huxley - "Along the Road"

Like all great travellers, I have seen more than I remember; and I remember more than I have seen." -Benjamin Disraeli

"If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home." -James A. Michener

"I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list." -Susan Sontag

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

"Every exit is an entry somewhere else." -Tom Stoppard

"What am I doing here?" -Rimbaud writing home from Ethiopia

"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect." -Paul Theroux

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveller is unaware." -Martin Buber

"It is almost axiomatic that the worst trains take you through magical places." -Paul Theroux

"People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home."
-Dagobert D. Runes, US writer

"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land." -G. K. Chesterton

"One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind." -Charles Dickens

"[The traveller] may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or dangers, excepting in rare cases, nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipates. In a moral point of view, the effect ought to be, to teach him good-humoured patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence. . . Travelling ought also to teach him distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance." -Charles Darwin

"He won't fly on the Balinese airline, Garuda, because he won't fly on any airline where the pilots believe in reincarnation." -Spalding Gray

"I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience -- and laughter." -Susan M. Watkins

"A year to go around the world! A whole twelve months of scenes and curious happenings in far-off foreign lands! You have thought of doing this, almost promised yourself that when you got old enough, and rich enough, and could "spare the time," you too would go around the world. Most of us get old enough; some of us get rich enough; but the time! the time! - to spare the time, to cut loose from goods and lands, from stocks and dreary desks, quit clients, patients, readers, home and friends - ay, and our enemies whom we so dearly love! Full many a promise must be broken and few the voyagers round the world." -D.N. Richardson, "A Girdle Round the Earth", 1888

"We should consider every day lost in which we do not Dance at least once" -Nietzsche

Thanks Michael Tierney