quotations about travel
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.
ITALO CALVINO
Invisible Cities
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
The traveled mind is the catholic mind educated from exclusiveness and egotism.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Emily the Strange: Piece of Mind
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
He didn't really like travel, of course. He liked the idea of travel, and the memory of travel, but not travel itself.
JULIAN BARNES
Flaubert's Parrot
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 the last fantasy the 2Oth Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
CHRISTINA G. ROSSETTI
Up-Hill
Travel is ... a means of conquering space and time.
JILLY TRAGANOU
Travel, Space, Architecture
Travelling is an excellent means of living in idleness; we acquire by it a kind of knowledge which is not always beneficial, and estrange ourselves from our daily avocations to partake liberally of the vices and pleasures of other people.
T. SMITH
attributed, Day's Collacon
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education, in the elder, a part of experience.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Travel", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
He travels safest in the dark night who travels lightest.
FERNANDO CORTEZ
attributed, Conquest of Mexico
The traveler is active; he goes strenuously in search of people, of adventure, or experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him.
DANIEL J. BOORSTIN
attributed, Voyages of Discover
The soul of the journey is liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk
In travelling by land, there is a continuity of scene, and a connected succession of persons and incidents, that carry on the story of life, and lessen the effect of absence and separation.
WASHINGTON IRVING
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon
When a traveller returneth home, let him not leave the countries, where he hath travelled, altogether behind him; but maintain a correspondence by letters, with those of his acquaintance, which are of most worth. And let his travel appear rather in his discourse, than his apparel or gesture; and in his discourse, let him be rather advised in his answers, than forward to tell stories; and let it appear that he doth not change his country manners, for those of foreign parts; but only prick in some flowers, of that he hath learned abroad, into the customs of his own country.
FRANCIS BACON
"Of Travel", The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral
A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles.
EDWARD ABBEY
Desert Solitaire
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
Never travel by sea when you can go by land.
CATO
attributed, Day's Collacon