Travel Quotes

Bilbo was sadly reflecting that adventures are not all pony-rides in May-sunshine...

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won’t happen. As the day approached, my warm bed and comfortable house grew increasingly desirable and my dear wife incalculably precious. To give these up for three months for the terrors of the uncomfortable and unknown seemed crazy. I didn’t want to go. Something had to happen to forbid my going, but it didn’t.

~ John Steinbeck

There is one thing I can say for certain: the older a person gets, the lonelier he becomes. It's true for everyone. But maybe that isn't wrong. What I mean is, in a sense our lives are nothing more than a series of stages to help us get used to loneliness. That being the case, there's no reason to complain. And besides who would be complaint to anyway? (A Walk To Kobe, Granta 124: Travel)

~ Haruki Murakami

Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet's blurred reality.

~ Andrew Solomon

Something right in the morning can turn into something wrong in the afternoon! Even if you are on the right path, you must still question the rightness of your path! Conditions perpetually change! Update your path and your travel constantly!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

For of this world one never sees enough and to dine in harmony with nature is one of the gentlest and loveliest things we can do.

~ James A. Michener

Perhaps it is the setting, rules tend to reduce their grip when you cross borders.

~ Rita Golden Gelman

To travel across Spain and finally to reach Barcelona is like drinking a respectable red wine and finishing up with a bottle of champagne.

~ James A. Michener

We have a set of rules for our faith, our sexuality, our marriages, our dating relationships, for choosing a church—nothing is off-limits. We tell ourselves to always do this, and never do that, and everything will turn out perfectly. Worse than that, we back up our rules with Bible verses and tell everyone else to follow them too.

~ Allison Fallon

My own experiences in the wild rank in value just behind the birth of my children, my wedding, and the memorial services and graduations I’ve attended. I am permanently affected by those solitary encounters with land, sky, and water, and all that’s contained within. I don’t really know if I am a better person because of them, but I am happier for them. Letters, The American Scholar, Autumn 2016

~ Jeff Rasley

I had the endless day, months and months of endless days, and yet my return date bounded this sense of boundlessness, kept it from becoming threatening.

~ Ben Lerner

Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours.

~ Ben Lerner

Human migration is an important part of our ancestral story. The places we live shape us, the places we leave behind forges our history, and the places we might travel to becomes our mysterious future.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.

~ Jack Kerouac

We're all astronauts, really, aren't we; interstellar astronauts, travelling so far into the blackness we can never return.

~ S.k. Tremayne

and so I opened my eyes and I opened my mind and I saw something I never would have noticed on a bicycle unless I was going very, very fast down a very long hill. Because of the speed of the bus and how I was exerting no effort, the telephone wires on the side of the road, sagging between poles, went up and down with the same rhythm as my heartbeat.

~ Antoine Wilson

We all have that one friend who is either on a road-trip or planning a road-trip or thinking about a road-trip or talking to people who are on road-trip or posting quotes about road-trip.

~ Crestless Wave

And I keep wandering in search of a nothingness...

~ Avijeet Das

It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme.

~ Jon Krakauer

The journey is greater than the destination.

~ Rick Riordan

There are no safe voyages and no safe ports.

~ Marty Rubin

I pass to the Stationery Department. I buy several fountain and stylographic pens - it being my experience that, though a fountain pen in England behaves in an exemplary manner, the moment it is let loose in desert surroundings, it perceives that it is at liberty to go on strike and behaves accordingly, either spouting ink indiscriminately over me, my clothes, my notebook and anything else handy, or else coyly refusing to do anything but scratch invisibly across the surface of the paper. I also buy a modest two pencils. Pencils are, fortunately, not temperamental, and though given to a knack of quiet disappearance, I have always a resource at hand. After all, what is the use of an architect if not to borrow pencils from.

~ Agatha Christie Mallowan

I have no home in the sense that is generally understood and so there is nothing to prevent me enjoying to the uttermost the spirit of wanderlust that has entered my soul. I am never lonely. How can I be when there is so much to see and admire in the world?

~ Gertrude Benham

His introduction throws me. The only time I can envision Hi, I'm a surgeon as a fitting introduction is if I were on a gurney in a stark white room and a man wielding a scalpel was standing over me. Plus, it's been a while since we've talked careers with anyone. Jobs are rarely a topic of conversation anymore--they exist in a place and time too far away to seem interesting. What do you do? is not a question asked to define someone, because out here we're all working the same jobs: yachties, mechanics, navigators, weather-readers, fishermen, adventure travelers, storytellers.

~ Torre Deroche

Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I'd want to murder.

~ Bruce Chatwin

I bought the wrong face soap. Why? Because it says smooth face cleanser on it. I put it on my face and I'm fairly certain it's lotion. I also bought something that says Body soufflé. What is that? Is it a lotion? Is it shower gel? Am I supposed to eat it?

~ Heather Jonasson

Ethel and Frances found a means for consolation together: travel.

~ Nancy Carpentier Brown

Frances was not only grieving her sister's loss, but also striving to reconcile in her mind the tragedy with the idea of a loving God. Restless and aching, Frances climbed mountains in the Swiss Alps, where their hotel had a view of beautiful Mount Rigi.

~ Nancy Carpentier Brown

Real traveling is not about visiting places but 're-visiting' our inner-self.

~ Sorrab Singha

Terrible things happened when you were least expecting them...But it seemed that wonderful things could happen too. You could be forced to take a trip, not knowing who you would meet. Not knowing that it would change your life.

~ Morgan Matson

all I wanted was to go off to some other world, a place beyond anybody's reach. A place beyond the flow of time.

~ Haruki Murakami

But our back is to legends and we are coming home. I suppose this is the first taste of it.''There is a long road yet,' said Gandalf.'But it is the last road,' said Bilbo.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

By allowing the group of people whom we call “our loved ones” to continually expand, we realize that this group is actually limitless. It is only narrow-mindedness and a superficial convention that makes us divide people into friends and strangers. The world-traveler soon learns to see in every person he interacts with a potential friend .

~ Nicos Hadjicostis

There is no real conflict between nationalism and globalism. On the contrary: It is to the extent that a nation becomes more global in its achievements that it becomes admirable.

~ Nicos Hadjicostis

The culmination of every supreme nationalism is a consummate universalism.

~ Nicos Hadjicostis

…So, um, you’re from Rochester? Like, New York?” Jersey asked.“Yup, we used to live out there,” Rudger confirmed, nonchalant. “You ever been?”“Naw, the closest I’ve ever been to there would be… well, believe it or not, New Jersey, the place where my parents named me after. It was crowded, polluted and full of crime… I loved it.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

The stars are far brighterThan gems without measure,The moon is far whiterThan silver in treasure;The fire is more shiningOn hearth in the gloamingThan gold won by mining,So why go a-roaming?

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

The world-traveler must, on the one hand, be ready (and actually seek) to visit a tribe in the Solomon Islands or stay with Tibetan nomads; on the other hand, he has to be prepared, when it is required, to wear his suit to attend a classical music concert in a big metropolis. Just as an important part of exploring Brazil is to visit its shantytowns, it is an indispensable part of understanding the French culture to eat at a gourmet restaurant in Paris.

~ Nicos Hadjicostis

Legs: the symbol of my solitude, my individual path, my uniqueness. Arms: the symbol of togetherness, my connection to others, my belonging to the human race. My legs make me who I am; they create my solitary path. My arms make me who I belong to; they connect me to the world.

~ Nicos Hadjicostis

Every question may be considered the beginning, the prerequisite of the search for knowledge. Every answer may be considered the fruition of a question.

~ Nicos Hadjicostis