quotations about travel
Travel is the last fantasy the 2Oth Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
Today's luxury consumer travels in a much more personalized way, taking on various travel personas depending on the trip. Knowing how to ask the right questions to get at the core of what the traveler hopes to experience and achieve is the key.
MATTHEW UPCHURCH
"Interview: Virtuoso Travel CEO on the Future of the New Luxury Traveler", Skift, May 16, 2017
All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
The world is like a Mask dancing. If you want to see it well, you do not stand in one place.
CHINUA ACHEBE
Arrow of God
Soulful travel is the art of finding beauty even in ruins.
PHIL COUSINEAU
The Art of Pilgrimage
I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it.
SIR THOMAS BEECHAM
attributed, The Quotable Traveler
Those who visit foreign nations, but who associate only with their own countrymen, change their climate, but not their customs; they ... return home with travelled bodies, but untravelled minds.
CHARLES CALEB COLTON
Lacon
Travel is like death in that it requires separation and, indeed, mourning. And travel by sea, unlike the far more rapid air travel, gives time for mourning, separation, and loss as one sees space slowly open between ship and shore and watches the coastline recede and eventually disappear.
PHILIP H. PFATTEICHER
Liturgical Spirituality
The soul of the journey is liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk
Travel is the soul of civilization.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
attributed, The Art of Pilgrimage
Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
PAUL THEROUX
introduction, The Best American Travel Writing
Better sit still where born, I say,
Wed one sweet woman and love her well,
Love and be loved in the old East way,
Drink sweet waters, and dream in a spell,
Than to wander in search of the Blessed Isles,
And to sail the thousands of watery miles
In search of love, and find you at last
On the edge of the world, and a curs'd outcast.
JOAQUIN MILLER
Pace Implora
Travel is one of the greatest facilitators of creation, if only because it forces us to observe other ways of creating things.
BLAKE SNOW
"Off The Grid: Why Do We Travel?", Paste Magazine, May 16, 2017
Every traveler has a tale to tell.
DAVID C. SMITH & RICHARD L. TIERNEY
The Ring of Ikribu
Any youth who doesn't travel is like a blind person.
SEKOU CAMARA
"The Dan"
I depart,
Whither I know not; but the hour's gone by
When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.
LORD BYRON
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Travel is like knowledge. The more you see the more you know you haven't seen.
MARK HERTSGAARD
Earth Odyssey
Travel is ... a means of conquering space and time.
JILLY TRAGANOU
Travel, Space, Architecture
I assure you that without travel we (at least men of the arts and sciences) are miserable creatures. A man of mediocre talent will remain mediocre whether he travels or not; but one of superior talent (which I cannot deny that I am, without doing wrong) will go to seed if he remains continually in one place.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART
letter to Leopold Mozart, September 11, 1778