Motivational Quotes

Travel

The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.

- Gordimer, Nadine

Best Quotes about Travel

Inter-railers are the ambulatory equivalent of Macdonald's, walking testimony to the erosion of French culture.

Thompson, Alice

Without stirring abroad, one can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window one can see the way of heaven. The further one goes the less one knows.

Lao-Tzu

If my ship sails from sight, it doesn't mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends.

Powell, John Enoch

Travel is a fools paradise.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.

Miller, Henry

Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.

Johnson, Samuel

A wise traveler never depreciates their own country.

Goldoni, Carlo

There is no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.

Burney, Fanny

Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

The average tourist wants to go to places where there are no tourists.

Ewing, Sam

11.

He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the horses are sluggish. He longs for the time of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he expected.

Johnson, Samuel

12.

The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.

Allen, Fred A.

13.

Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.

Sontag, Susan

14.

A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey.

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

15.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty -- his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

Huxley, Aldous

17.

In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.

Runcie, Robert

18.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans --which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

Eliot, George

19.

It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

20.

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

Lerner, Max

21.

We travelers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic.

Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley

22.

Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.

Lawrence, D. H.

23.

I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.

Wilde, Oscar

24.

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

25.

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Steinbeck, John

26.

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.

Twain, Mark

27.

For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.

Baudelaire, Charles

28.

Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.

Lawrence, D. H.

29.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres?

Bishop, Elisabeth

30.

Traveling makes a man wiser, but less happy.

Jefferson, Thomas

31.

Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

Miriam Beard

32.

I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.

Byron, Lord

33.

For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.

Stevenson, Robert Louis

34.

When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.

Clifton Fadiman

35.

Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.

Kuralt, Charles

36.

The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack.

Ade, George

37.

The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

38.

The alternative to a vacation is to stay home and tip every third person you see.

39.

Does this boat go to Europe, France?

Loos, Anita

40.

Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse

Fuller, Thomas

41.

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

Huxley, Aldous

42.

Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

Raban, Jonathan

43.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will --whatever we may think.

Durrell, Lawrence

44.

To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.

Delillo, Don

45.

If it's tourist season, why can't we kill them?

46.

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Hemingway, Ernest

47.

Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.

Thurber, James

48.

Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.

Theroux, Paul