quotations about travel
Our object in traveling should be, not to gratify curiosity, and seek mere temporary amusement, but to learn, and to venerate, to improve the understanding and the heart.
NIGEL GRESLEY
attributed, American Medical Association Bulletin, 1933
Travel can be fun, as long as you have the right attitude and plan the trip with realistic expectations.
LEWIS WALKER
"Travel dreams 2017", Dunwoody Crier, May 16, 2017
Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour
Soulful travel is the art of finding beauty even in ruins.
PHIL COUSINEAU
The Art of Pilgrimage
A wise man travels to discover himself.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Fireside Travels
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
Travel is an attitude, a state of mind. It is not residence, it is motion.
PAUL THEROUX
introduction, The Best American Travel Writing
Travel is the soul of civilization.
ZORA NEALE HURSTON
attributed, 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
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
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
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
The soul of the journey is liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk
Travel is like knowledge. The more you see the more you know you haven't seen.
MARK HERTSGAARD
Earth Odyssey
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
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
There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures.
CHARLES DARWIN
The Voyage of the Beagle
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
The reason why there are so many narrow-minded people in the world is, because there is so little travelling in it.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
Intuitions and Summaries of Thought
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