Travel Quotes

My meal arrived. It was a bowl of tepid, green curried water with two spinach leaves floating in it. The waiter called it 'vegetable soup'. I called it inedible slop.

~ Frank Kusy

Put down that map and get wonderfully lost.

~ Anonymous

I pity snails, and all that carry their homes on their backs.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

...I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival...

~ Rebecca Solnit

As well as writing, 2004 saw my first attempt at wine making: the elixir of life. Unfortunately, my effort tasted more like the elixir of death.

~ Craig Briggs

If you ever find yourself on a path that just doesn't feel safe anymore, you have every right to stop the car. Get out - change your shoes and start walking.

~ Jennifer Elisabeth

But what I do know is this: you got to find your own places. The places you get, girl, the ones that stick in your heart. And if you’re lucky, you find people to share them with.

~ Kirsten Hubbard

So we navigate mostly by dead reckoning, and deduction from what clues we find. I keep a compass in one pocket for overcast days when the sun doesn't show directions and have the map mounted in a special carrier on top of the gas tank where I can keep track of miles from the last junction and know what to look for. With those tools and a lack of pressure to 'get somewhere' it works out fine and we just about have America all to ourselves.

~ Robert M. Pirsig

It was as if I was right there with Magellan, following every curve of his pen as he wrote down his words to his beloved ones confiding his secret. I had become the ink, and the tip was tattooing my path. I was going to follow his dream, but still, I wished I knew why” – Celma Ribeiro

~ Celma Ribeiro

If you don't know your history, you don't know what you are talking about!

~ Barbara Ann Mojica

I was seeing the world, and it turned out to be a lonely place.

~ Tyler Mcmahon

Life is not being sure what will come next or how it will come. We guess at everything we do. We take leap after leap in the dark and that's the joy of living and the beauty of faith. When we grow tired, when we sit still, that's when we begin to die.... One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time.

~ Angela Elwell Hunt

I'll pretty much try any cheese, but I have found that I prefer young goats and old cows. I don't like gray areas.

~ Nichole Robertson

Separating fact and fiction in Inca history is impossible, because virtually all the sources available are Spanish accounts of stories that had already been vetted by the Inca emperors to highlight their own heroic roles. Imagine a history of modern Iraq written by Dick Cheney and based on authorized biographies of Sadam Hussein published in Arabic, and you'll get some idea of what historians face.

~ Mark Adams

The sun was beginning to set and the water was sparkling in the low light as the onshore breeze that had built up through the heat of the day rippled across the reflective surface, breaking it into a million diamonds of yellow-white light.

~ Emma Bamford

Each time I say good-bye to a place I like, I feel like I am leaving a part of me behind. I guess whether we choose to travel as much as Marco Polo did or stay in the same spot from cradle to grave, life is a sequence of births and deaths. Moments are born and moments die. For new experiences to come to light, old ones need to wither away.

~ Elif Shafak

Reading is poor man's way of travelling not just around the world but into the minds of people.

~ Anonymous

You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous anymore.

~ Roald Dahl

You are too timid for me. You care too much about what other people think. But you know what? Because you are so desperate to win the approval of others, you'll never get rid of their criticisms, no matter how hard you try. You say you want to travel the path, but you don't want to sacrifice anything to that end. Money, fame, power, lavishness, or carnal pleasure - whatever it is that one holds most dear in life, one should dispose of that first.

~ Elif Shafak

If you find holes in my book that you could drive a car through, do not be too sure they were not left there for that express purpose.

~ Mary Austin

No matter how deeply you come to know a place, you can keep coming back to know it more.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Leaving home's a cinch. It's the staying, once you've found it, that takes courage.

~ Catherine Watson

Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements may seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. There, too, we may find ourselves anchoring emotions of love on the way a person butters his or her bread, or recoiling at his or her taste in shoes. To condemn ourselves for these minute concerns is to ignore how rich in meaning details may be.

~ Alain De Botton

Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life is protean—an ever changing phantasmagoria, where the impossible happens and the unexpected jumps out of the bushes at every turn of the road. The hobo never knows what is going to happen the next moment; hence, he lives only in the present moment. He has learned the futility of telic endeavor, and knows the delight of drifting along with the whimsicalities of Chance

~ Jack London

After a lifetime of soft, easy living in the West, one's buttocks take an awful hammering out here. Backpacking around India is just one long round of sitting on bone-hard, chafing, bruising and generally uncomfortable seats-whether in buses our trains, or restaurants or cinemas. There is no such thing as a padded seat in the whole country.

~ Frank Kusy

We might laugh at the notion of plastic tea sets in the jungle, but it is a time-honored ritual for Western travelers to collect preindustrial artifacts to use as home decorations...Possession of primitive artifacts suggests worldly knowledge, just as in the highland communities of Borneo an electronic wristwatch that plays Happy Birthday is the mark of a great traveler. Funny thing how travel can narrow the mind.

~ Eric Hansen

In Paris, the dance was everything. The dance of romance was what a man could remember in his old age. Didn’t all young Americans come to Europe in search of that kind of romance?

~ Peggy Kopman-Owens

Traveling is all very well if you can get home at night. I would be willing to go around the world if I could be back in time to light the candles and set the table for dinner.” ♥ Gladys Taber.

~ Gladys Taber

Yellowstone, of all the national parks, is the wildest and most universal in its appeal... Daily new, always strange, ever full of change, it is Nature's wonder park. It is the most human and the most popular of all parks. -Yellowstone Park for Your Vacation (circa 1920s)

~ Susan Rugh

When standing in the middle of the marvelous mountains and deep forests, in the earthy smell of all beginnings and endings, I often find myself asking what I have if all my possessions were taken away. Without money, car, house; or power and fame, if there are any, who am I? In that very moment, being away from the external voices and left alone in nature, I find my answer.

~ Zi Nguyen

Well, I like to know where I'm going before I try to get there. It's a mistake to try to execute a plan before you've thought of one, in my experience.

~ Max Barry

You might want to sit in public squares and people watch for an hour in one place and a month in another. I can tell by the way you're peeling that grapefruit. You want to get lost. Somewhere where they have ordinary life you can join in. Slip right in there and have a bowl of soup in the clothes you have on now. Go hear a concert you read about stapled to a telephone pole. There are lots of places like that in the world.

~ Kathleen Winter

I wanted to find my voice, so I sat in silence.I wanted joy, so I cried my heart open.I wanted wisdom, so I capered in bodacious foolishness.I wanted freedom, so I felt my bonds.

~ Catherine Scott

Man, you should write a book.’‘I know. You couldn’t make this stuff up, could you?

~ Stephanie Wood

It is the right of a traveller to vent their frustration at every minor inconvenience by writing of it to their friends.

~ Susanna Clarke

Life is about the adventures you take and the memories you make. So travel often and live life with open eyes and an open heart.

~ Katie Grissom

But the vagrant owns the whole vast earth that ends only at the nonexistent horizon, and his empire is an intangible one, for his domination and enjoyment of it are things of the spirit.

~ Isabelle Eberhardt

Look for chances to take the less-traveled roads. There are no wrong turns.

~ Susan Magsamen

What a strange revelation of self-esteem it is when people only love those who think and feel as they do - an extension of themselves, in fact! Even Christianity does not cure us, since one cannot feel right without assuming that the rest must be wrong. Personally I would rather feel wrong with everybody else than right all by myself: I like people different, and agree with the man who said that the worst of the human race is the number of duplicates.

~ Freya Stark