Travel Quotes

The passion for travelling is, I believe, instinctive in some natures. We have seen men persevere in their enterprises against the most formidable obstacles; and, without means or friends, and even ignorant of the languages of the various countries through which they passed, pursue their perilous journeys into remote places, until, like the knight in the Arabian tale, they succeeded in snatching a memorial from every shrine they visited.

~ James Holman

It is part of wisdom never to revisit a wilderness, for the more golden the lily, the more certain that someone has gilded it.

~ Aldo Leopold

We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.

~ Geoff Dyer

Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'WorriesForget your worriesAll the stations full of cracks tilted along the wayThe telegraph wires they hang fromThe grimacing poles that gesticulate and strangle themThe world stretches lengthens and folds in like an accordion tormented by a sadistic handIn the cracks of the sky the locomotives in angerFleeAnd in the holes,The whirling wheels the mouths the voicesAnd the dogs of misfortune that bark at our heelsThe demons are unleashedIron railsEverything is off-keyThe broun-roun-roun of the wheelsShocksBouncesWe are a storm under a deaf man's skull...'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'Hell yes, you're getting on my nerves you know very well we're far awayOverheated madness bellows in the locomotivePlague, cholera rise up like burning embers on our wayWe disappear in the war sucked into a tunnelHunger, the whore, clings to the stampeding cloudsAnd drops battle dung in piles of stinking corpsesDo like her, do your job'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?

~ Blaise Cendrars

Real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you're home. It's about the loneliness, the solitude, the evenings spent by yourself, pining to be somewhere else. Those are the moments of true value. You feel half proud of them and half ashamed and you hold them to your heart.

~ Tahir Shah

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.

~ Wallace Stegner

We all look back at some time or other and wonder why we didn't listen to our instincts. Why did we hestiate? Why did we lose our dreams?

~ Diane Griffith

In the cramped confines of the toilet I had trouble getting out of my wet trousers, which clung to my legs like a drowning man. The new ones were quite complicated too in that they had more legs than a spider; either that or they didn't have enough legs to get mine into. The numbers failed to add up. Always there was one trouser leg too many or one of my legs was left over. From the outside it may have looked like a simple toilet, but once you were locked in here the most basic rules of arithmetic no longer held true.

~ Geoff Dyer

I bow my head submissively and see that my chest is heaving, already dotted with the telltale flush of sexual arousal.

~ Donna George Storey

The pen is truly mightier than the sword. Unless you're holding a pen and the other guy's holding a sword.

~ Dave Besseling

Soon you catch your first glimpse of a vineyard basking in the sun, its broad leaves silently turning sunlight into sugar, ripening vitis vinifera, the European grapes that make the world’s finest wines. For a moment you might imagine you’ve been mysteriously wafted to the French countryside, but no, this is the East End of Long Island, the most exciting new wine region in North America. You’ve reached your destination, but your journey of discovery has barely begun

~ Jane Taylor Starwood

Be as intellectual as you like about it, but India is brilliantly mad. And if you want to love it, you have to hate it first.

~ Simon Dring

...in the unique case of a country’s geographic position, it is difficult to consider this factor as anything other than a cause, unless we assume that in prehistoric times peoples migrated to climates that fit their concepts of power distance, which is rather far-fetched.

~ Geert Hofstede

It seemed like all the way to tomorrow and over it to the days beyond.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.

~ Anthony Bourdain

It is a bitter-sweet thing, knowing two cultures. Once you leave your birthplace nothing is ever the same.

~ Sarah Turnbull

To become a writer a person must read constantly, the more varied the writers and their material then all the better. One must also have a lot of life experience, travel to exotic locations and live among the local people. Yet most importantly a writer needs the determination to keep at their writing regardless of what others might say or think about it

~ Andrew James Pritchard

The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller. The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller. The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists. The first study large things and live in a small world; the second study small things and live in a large world. It is inspiriting without doubt to whizz in a motor-car round the earth, to feel Arabia as a whirl of sand or China as a flash of rice-fields. But Arabia is not a whirl of sand and China is not a flash of rice-fields. They are ancient civilizations with strange virtues buried like treasures. If we wish to understand them it must not be as tourists or inquirers, it must be with the loyalty of children and the great patience of poets. To conquer these places is to lose them.

~ G.k. Chesterton

You think of travellers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one of the laziest ways on earth of passing the time.

~ Paul Theroux

...Bhutan all but bases its identity upon its loneliness, and its refusal to b assimilated into India, or Tibet, or Nepal. Vietnam, at present, is a pretty girl with her face pressed up against the window of the dance hall, waiting to be invited in; Iceland is the mystic poet in the corner, with her mind on other things. Argentina longs to be part of the world it left and, in its absence, re-creates the place it feels should be its home; Paraguay simply slams the door and puts up a Do Not Disturb sign. Loneliness and solitude, remoteness and seclusion, are many worlds apart.

~ Pico Iyer

Everyone is a Wordsworth in certain moods, and every traveler seeks out places that every traveler has missed.

~ Pico Iyer

On that trip I learnt something very important. Escape through travel works. Almost from the moment I boarded my flight, life in England became meaningless. Seat-belt signs lit up, problems switched off. Broken armrests took precedence over broken hearts. By the time the plane was airborne I'd forgotten England even existed. (The Beach)

~ Alex Garland

Traveling can never be taken for granted, no matter how meticulous the preparations.

~ Eugene Linden

by travelling to all the corners of the globe it allows me to further define the ever changing world we live in, which in turn helps me to redefine myself, therefore it is an important process towards becoming a complete person.

~ Andrew James Pritchard

If the landscape of human emotion were to exist in country, it would be in Italy. ~Lisa Fantino/Amalfi Blue

~ Lisa Fantino

...and should I die in her care, I would leave smiling because, I will linger in the hills beside her...

~ Kellie Elmore

In any age, there is no shortage of people willing to embark on a hazardous adventure. Columbus and Magellan filled eight ships between them for voyages into the void. One hundred and fifty years ago, the possibilities offered by missionary service were limitless and first-rate. Later, Scott and Shackleton turned away droves after filling their crews for their desperate Antarctic voyages. In 1959 ... sailor H.W. Tilman, looking for a crew for a voyage in an old wooden yacht to the Southern Ocean, ran this ad in the London Times: Hand [man] wanted for long voyage in small boat. No pay, no prospects, not much pleasure. Tilman received more replies than he could investigate, one from as far away as Saigon.

~ Peter Nichols

And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems.

~ Donna George Storey

The French know the intrinsic value of holding on to the past, its pleasures, its promises, and its tender mercies.

~ Peggy Kopman-Owens

You wind back the clock several decades when you visit a Lonely Place; and when you touch down, you half expect a cabin attendant to announce, We have now landed in Lonely Place's Down-at-Heels Airport, where the local time is 1943 and the temperature is...frozen.

~ Pico Iyer

This would become a lifelong pattern, sitting in my comfort zone high above the world in some sort of self-imposed exile.

~ Peggy Kopman-Owens

...[I]t behooves a man who wants to see wonders sometimes to go out of his way.

~ John Mandeville

If I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for everybody.Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.

~ Anthony Bourdain

Now, bring me that horizon.

~ Johnny Depp

Wanderlust is incurable.

~ Mark Jenkins

‎W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is--and always will be--ourselves.

~ Ian Mortimer

They hadn't much faith in travel, nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going.

~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Maps are essential. Planning a journey without a map is like building a house without drawings.

~ Mark Jenkins

At the root of Japanese manufacturing lies a feminine delicacy and shyness as well as a childlike curiosity and fantasy-filled worldview.

~ Morinosuke Kawaguchi

Every journey is personal. Every journey is spiritual. You can't compare them, can't replace, can't repeat. You can bring back the memories but they only bring tears to your eyes.

~ Riana Ambarsari