“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
“I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.”
― Paulo Coelho
“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
“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
“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
“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
“The few times I said to myself anywhere: ‘Now that’s a nice spot for a permanent home,’ I would immediately hear in my mind the thunder of an avalanche carrying away the hundreds of far places which I would destroy by the very act of settling in one particular nook of the earth.”
― Vladimir Nabokov
“And my mother, whose radius of travel was short, tied the letters with ribbon and kept them in her desk, When you get the chance, she said to me, “go.”
― Frances Mayes
“The ordinary traveler, who never goes off the beaten route and who on this beaten route is carried by others, without himself doing anything or risking anything, does not need to show much more initiative and intelligence than an express package,” Roosevelt sneered.”
― Candice Millard
“Why was I still traveling? Was it purely because it was better than turning around and going home, where I would have to make grown-up choices about my future? Or was I waiting to happen across a place that would tell me to stay?”
― Pete Spurrier
“I travel to be replenished with beauty, for travel makes the beauty of this world seem like a Christmas that never ends.”
― Carew Papritz
“To the tourist, travel is a means to an end; to the traveler, it’s an end in itself.”
― Marty Rubin
“You must go on adventures to find out where you belong.”
― Sue Fitzmaurice
“There’s something profoundly intense and intoxicating about friendship found en route. It’s the bond that arises from being thrust into uncomfortable circumstances, and the vulnerability of trusting others to navigate those situations. It’s the exhilaration of meeting someone when we are our most alive selves, breathing new air, high on life-altering moments. It’s the discovery of the commonality of the world’s people and the attendant rejection of prejudices. It’s the humbling experience of being suspicious of a stranger who then extends a great kindness. It’s the astonishment of learning from those we set out to teach. It’s the intimacy of sharing small spaces, the recognition of a kindred spirit across the globe.
It’s the travel relationship, and it can only call itself family.”
― Lavinia Spalding
“I travel not only for the passion and madness and desire of movement, but because travel, like bread and water and air, becomes necessary to a life fully dreamed and lived.”
― Carew Papritz
“I pity snails, and all that carry their homes on their backs.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien
“Put down that map and get wonderfully lost.”
― Anonymous
“I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival…”
― Rebecca Solnit
“The road never ends … only our vision does.”
― Amit Reddy
“I’m not a foreigner because I haven’t been praying to return safely home, I haven’t wasted my time imagining my house, my desk, my side of the bed. I am not a foreigner because we are all travelling, we are all full of the same questions, the same tiredness, the same fears, the same selfishness and the same generosity. I am not a foreigner because, when I asked, I received. When I knocked, the door opened. When I looked, I found.”
― Paolo Coelho
“Travel is such a wonderful experience! Especially when you forget you are traveling. Then you will enjoy whatever you see and do. Those who look into themselves when they travel will not think about what they see. In fact, there is no distinction between the viewer and the seen. You experience everything with the totality of yourself, so that every blade of grass, every mountain, every lake is alive and is a part of you. When there is no division between you and what is other, this is the ultimate experience of traveling.”
― Liezi
“We did all the tourist crap, but I just wanted to sit in a cafe and watch people”
― Sara Shepard
“There is nothing more exasperating than reading in contemporary guidebooks disparagements of places that are deemed to be “seedy.” Do the writers not notice that such places are invariably crowded with people? When a neighborhood is described as “seedy” by some Lonely Planet prude, I immediately head there.”
― Lawrence Osborne
“He has a passport,” my classmates would whisper. “Quick, let’s run before he judges us!”
― David Sedaris
“Anyone who needs more than one suitcase is a tourist, not a traveler”
― Ira Levin
“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
― Pico Iyer
“I would like travelers, especially American travelers, to travel in a way that broadens their perspective, because I think Americans tend to be some of the most ethnocentric people on the planet. It’s not just Americans, it’s the big countries. It’s the biggest countries that tend to be ethnocentric or ugly. There are ugly Russians, ugly Germans, ugly Japanese and ugly Americans. You don’t find ugly Belgians or ugly Bulgarians, they’re just too small to think the world is their norm.”
― Rick Steves
“The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory.”
― Gregory Maguire
“I suspected, however, that I wasn’t homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn’t find: the past and all the people and places there were lost to me.”
― Alice Steinbach
“I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.”
― Charles Bukowski
“The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
“Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.”
― Thornton Wilder
“This was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as one is good, another is bad.”
― Roman Payne
“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you might better stay home.”
― James A. Michener
“We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered.”
― Kahlil Gibran
“Every one of a hundred thousand cities around the world had its own special sunset and it was worth going there, just once, if only to see the sun go down.”
― Ryū Murakami
