Travel Quotes

The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.

~ Tom Carter

The only thing--I tell you this straight from the heart--that disgusts me in Salzburg is that one can't have any proper social intercourse with those people--and that music does not have a better reputation...For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!...A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not--but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes--bad, if he always stays in the same place. If the archbishop would trust me, I would soon make his music famous; that is surely true.

~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Choose only one master — Nature.

~ Rembrandt

You'll live through my words and my pictures, and I'll live somewhere the skies are blue.

~ Maria Elena

Venice, it's temples and palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven.

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Photography is like exploring a new dimension, only I can go there but I can show you where I've been.

~ Destin Sparks

We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.

~ John Lubbock

At least as a single woman, I had time to pursue my own interests, read voraciously, and travel when opportunity presented.

~ Tasha Alexander

The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individualism in the midst of the herd, in hotel rooms to boycott the circumstances that separate her from her usual sources of comfort and stimulation, during office breaks to escape from the banal conversation of office mates, and at home to revolt against the pervasive and mind-deadening irrelevance of television.

~ Eric Burns

I read. That's my form of travel.

~ Michael Finkel

By reading books, you lose your old self and you find your new self! To read is to travel from self to another self!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I had begun reading the book on the plane just after take-off. And I realised that something does happen to you when you read fiction above ground: The intensity of each word and phrase is magnified and the world which the writer has created for you takes on a greater dimension than before. After a while, you can't tell fiction from fact.

~ Phan Ming Yen

If the body is the register of the real, then reading with one's feet is real in a way reading with one's eyes alone is not.

~ Rebecca Solnit

The spirit of the way is surely there, in the wish to wander through the world in order to escape it and to find others where there is nobody.

~ Jean-Christophe Rufin

There is this common notion that people are shallow and ignorant until they go out and see the world. I, on the other hand, went out and in comparison realized I was in pretty good standing.

~ Criss Jami

...I had always believed that I left a bit of me wherever I went. I also believed that I took a bit of every place with me. I never felt that more than with this trip. It was as if the act of touching these places, walking these roads,and asking these questions had added another column to my being. And the only possible explanation I could find for that feeling was that a spirit existed in many of the places I visited, and a spirit existed in me and the two had somehow met in the course of my travels. It's as if the godliness of the land and the godliness of my being had fused.

~ Bruce Feiler

In the end I believe the essential spirit that animates those places animates me. If that spirit is God, then I found God...If that spirit is life, then I found life...If that spirit is awe, then I found awe. Part of me suspects it's all three...all I had to do to discover that spirit and the resulting feeling of humility and appreciation was not to look or listen or taste or feel. All I had to do was remember, for what I was looking for I somehow already knew.

~ Bruce Feiler

He who has never left his hearth and has confined his researches to the narrow field of the history of his own country cannot be compared to the courageous traveller who has worn out his life in journeys of exploration to distant parts and each day has faced danger in order to persevere in excavating the mines of learning and in snatching precious fragments of the past from oblivion.

~ Al-Mas'udi

For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.

~ Tahir Shah

All our ancestors were murdered, murderers, complicit to murder, or combating murder.

~ Lucy Knisley

I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.

~ Martha Gellhorn

A rich and mature life involves opening up to a wider world. If we base our understanding of life only on what we personally experience, we are impoverished indeed.

~ Robert Strayer

He could sense in her the same spirit that ran in his veins. They were people with independent minds. They were not clerks at desks. They preferred to act. Accomplish something. They were rushing to reach the end. Such people need to be left alone. They are used to the darkness, the silence, the waiting. They belong to the same family. That of leopards.

~ Mahendra Jakhar

For walk where we will, we tread upon some story.

~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

There was something indomitable about Maria – like Britannia. He’d heard that she kept her head during a Chilean earthquake the year before when men of greater age and experience had panicked. Afterwards she was discovered calmly taking notes, recording the way the land hand risen, for publication, she said.

~ Sara Sheridan

The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.

~ Carl Sagan

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion.

~ Paul Theroux

We all must travel,' the driver said, keeping his eyes on the way ahead. His hands grasped the wheel firmly. 'It is the essence of all things, to move and change and keep going forward and backward and around. Even the spirits and the dead.

~ Nnedi Okorafor

Imagine that you are stuck on a long train ride and must choose one of two books to read in order to pass the time: the first is a novel whose main character is an office worker who is essentially working to pay his monthly cable bill; the second is about someone who decides to travel in South America (and of course encounters various setbacks in the process), but who pushes beyond the boundaries of conventional American life. Which... book would you pick up to read? Indeed, which of the two characters would you rather be?

~ Mark Thompson

Travel wasn't fun if you didn't get to see or do what you wanted; it was merely a different type of work, in a different place.

~ Chris Pavone

Only the road and the dawn, the sun, the wind, and the rain,And the watch fire under stars, and sleep, and the road again.

~ John Masefield

Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake…when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Czechs simply don’t say they’re going camping or spending time outdoors. They say, in Czech, that they are going “into the nature” as though nature, příroda, is beyond a place in the woods or other forms of terrain, that nature was a state of mind and had the ability to reverse the crippling, chaotic aspects of life.

~ M.b. Dallocchio

We are humiliated by what is powerful and mean, but awed by what is powerful and noble.

~ Alain De Botton

When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.

~ Rebecca Solnit

There is a whole world out there, waiting for you. A world filled with opportunities wherever and whenever you want to grasp them. And whether you do or you don’t…. well that is totally up to you.

~ Jellis Vaes

If you have to ask that question, you wouldn't understand the answer.

~ John Mcphee

I have seen travel plans happen only when they were made overnight.

~ Sanhita Baruah

Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Of course women's walking is often construed as performance rather than transport, with the implication that women walk not to see but to be seen, not for their own experience but for that of a male audience, which means that they are asking for whatever attention they receive.

~ Rebecca Solnit