Travel Quotes

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.

~ Alain De Botton

After weeks on the road, listening to a language you don’t understand, using a currency whose value you don’t comprehend, walking down streets you’ve never walked down before, you discover that your old “I,” along with everything you ever learned, is absolutely no use at all in the face of those new challenges, and you begin to realize that buried deep in your unconscious mind there is someone much more interesting and adventurous and more open to the world and to new experiences.

~ Paulo Coelho

Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains.

~ Alain De Botton

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

~ John Steinbeck

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Don’t tell me how educated you are, tell me how much you traveled.

~ Anonymous

The perfect journey is never finished, the goal is always just across the next river, round the shoulder of the next mountain. There is always one more track to follow, one more mirage to explore.

~ Rosita Forbes

[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.

~ Roman Payne

You have to taste a culture to understand it.

~ Deborah Cater

I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.

~ Mark Twain

What an absurdity to go and bury oneself in South America, where they are always having revolutions.

~ Agatha Christie

I wore only black socks, because I had heard that white ones were the classic sign of the American tourist. Black ones though,- those'll fool 'em. I supposed I hoped the European locals' conversation would go something like this:PIERRE: Ha! Look at that tourist with his camera and guidebook!JACQUES: Wait, but observe his socks! They are...black!PIERRE: Zut alors! You are correct! He is one of us! What a fool I am! Let us go speak to him in English and invite him to lunch!

~ Doug Mack

Oh, I can picture myself rattling along Route 66 on that thing, headphones on, singing along to ZZ Top's 'Sharp Dressed Man' or the opening line from 'Born to be Wild' by Steppenwolf - 'Get your motor running...' The trike brings out that in all of us, which is no bad thing. Forget Viagra, get yourself a trike!

~ Billy Connolly

In real life, the big things and the little things are inextricably mixed up together, so in Libya at one moment, one worried because one's native boots were full of holes, and at the next, perhaps, one wondered how long one would be alive to wear them.

~ Rosita Forbes

Forbes did, in fact, break new ground for women...She was an irrepressible and independent traveler who took risky and difficult trips, braved the hostility of the colonial officials and bureaucrats of the British empire, and invaded the male sphere of exploration, using charm, chutzpah--and her extensive network of establishment connections--to get where she wanted to go. (From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes, 1919-1937)

~ Margaret Bald

The red sands of Marrakesh, sprawling at the foot of the Atlas like a wounded Leviathan....

~ Rosita Forbes

We rode through a three-thousand-year-old country, saw the ruined capital of the Queen of Sheba and the underground red-rock city of Lalibela, fraternized with a tribe of leaden-skinned troglogytes living among the mountains, scrapped with brigands, outwitted crocodiles, and eventually emerged battered and in rags with a book of adventures and 1,000 feet of film.

~ Rosita Forbes

The curly red lines across the African deserts had the fascination of a magnet, and I hoped fervently that the pioneers who were writing their names over the blank spaces, would leave just one small desert for me.

~ Rosita Forbes

Your past experiences will flavour your future ones, that is human nature.

~ Deborah Cater

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.

~ Paul Bowles

...books were better than travel.

~ Pseudonymous Bosch

I've met the most interesting people while flying or on a boat. These methods of travel seem to attract the kind of people I want to be with.

~ Hedy Lamarr

We wandered in a frenzy and a dream (301).

~ Jack Kerouac

I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.

~ Paulo Coelho

A little crazy is good

~ Chris Hilton

Such people, while useful, even agreeable, to others, are, if truth be told, frequently unhappy–lonely in fact. Yes, they seek out others, and it may even seem to them that in a certain country or city they have managed to find true kinship and fellowship, having come to know and learn about a people; but they wake up one day and suddenly feel that nothing actually binds them to these people, that they can leave here at once. They realize that another country, some other people, have now beguiled them, and that yesterday’s most riveting event now pales and loses all meaning and significance. For all intents and purposes, they do not grow attached to anything, do not put down deep roots. Their empathy is sincere, but superficial. If asked which of the countries they have visited they like best, they are embarrassed–they do not know how to answer. Which one? In a certain sense–all of them. There is something compelling about each. To which country would they like to return once more? Again, embarrassment–they had never asked themselves such a question. The one certainty is that they would like to be back on the road, going somewhere. To be on their way again–that is the dream.

~ Ryszard Kapuściński

No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don’t get any work done because we’re all looking at it too much?

~ Patrick Ness

India – a land where the last thing one needs to bother with is looking good. In India – at least in the circles I moved in – it's natural to look beautiful by the smile in your heart and the way you move through the world.

~ Erin Reese

Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.

~ Rolf Potts

There are three trips you take to India: the one you think you’re going to have – that you plan for, the one you actually have, and the one you live through once you go back home.

~ Erin Reese

Whenever he was en route from one place to another, he was able to look at his life with a little more objectivity than usual. it was often on trpis that he thought most clearly, and made the decisions that he could not reach when he was stationary.

~ Paul Bowles

The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.

~ Frances Mayes

India will reveal to you the places in your heart that must be purified.

~ Erin Reese

Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.

~ George Eliot

[O]n general principles it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

All that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day (235).

~ Jack Kerouac

Travel empties out everything you’ve into the box called your life, all the things you accumulate to tell you who you are

~ Claire Fontaine

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

~ Frances Mayes

It had been agreed between them that lighted candles at wayside inns, in strange countries amid mountain scenery, gave the evening meal a peculiar poetry.

~ Henry James

The only other white people we saw during the three days we stayed there were a German couple intent on taking pictures of their stuffed sheep in a variety of locations around the world.

~ Tynan