quotations about travel
Travel is the last fantasy the 2Oth Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Arrow of God
Adventure is allowing the unexpected to happen to you. Exploration is experiencing what you have not experienced before. How can there be any adventure, any exploration, if you let somebody else -- above all, a travel bureau -- arrange everything before-hand?
RICHARD ALDINGTON
Death of a Hero
A wise man travels to discover himself.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Fireside Travels
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.
ITALO CALVINO
Invisible Cities
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
A wise traveller never despises his own country.
CARLO GOLDONI
attributed, Day's Collacon
I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it.
SIR THOMAS BEECHAM
attributed, The Quotable Traveler
Soulful travel is the art of finding beauty even in ruins.
PHIL COUSINEAU
The Art of Pilgrimage
Our object in traveling should be, not to gratify curiosity, and seek mere temporary amusement, but to learn, and to venerate, to improve the understanding and the heart.
NIGEL GRESLEY
attributed, American Medical Association Bulletin, 1933
Travel is the soul of civilization.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
attributed, The Art of Pilgrimage
Travel is like death in that it requires separation and, indeed, mourning. And travel by sea, unlike the far more rapid air travel, gives time for mourning, separation, and loss as one sees space slowly open between ship and shore and watches the coastline recede and eventually disappear.
PHILIP H. PFATTEICHER
Liturgical Spirituality
Travel is like a drug that permeates the mind with an indefinite but unusual tinge, stimulating and releasing, imparting a greater significance than they possess to the things that interest and amuse it.
OSBERT SITWELL
Discursions on Travel, Art, and Life
Travel is like knowledge. The more you see the more you know you haven't seen.
MARK HERTSGAARD
Earth Odyssey
To travel is to possess the world.
E. BURTON HOLMES
American Review of Reviews, December 1907
Voyaging great distances -- through forests, from island to island, across plains and into the mountains -- is all about finding ourselves.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen
Any youth who doesn't travel is like a blind person.
SEKOU CAMARA
"The Dan"
Long-term travel doesn't require a massive bundle of cash; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.
ROLF POTTS
Vagabonding
There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Voyage of the Beagle
I assure you that without travel we (at least men of the arts and sciences) are miserable creatures. A man of mediocre talent will remain mediocre whether he travels or not; but one of superior talent (which I cannot deny that I am, without doing wrong) will go to seed if he remains continually in one place.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
letter to Leopold Mozart, September 11, 1778