Quotes |
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Travelers' Quotes
Contributers
On the Rewards of TravelSamuel Johnson, "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." Freya Stark, "Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art." Lord Byron -- "[One of those] intemperate but keenly felt pursuits ... whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment." From the Elder Edda, sayings of the High One: Claude Levi-Strauss on the motivation of travel "In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth, such as [brazilwood and pepper, which] added a new range of sense experience to a civilization which had never suspected its own insipidity. ...[From] these same lands our modern Marco Polos now bring back the moral spices of which our society feels an increasing need as it is conscious of sinking further into boredom, but that this time they take the form of photographs, books, and travelers tales." "[The traveler] may feel assured, he will meet with no difficulties or dangers, excepting in rare cases, nearly so bad as he beforehand anticipates. In a moral point of view, the effect ought to be, to teach him good-humored patience, freedom from selfishness, the habit of acting for himself, and of making the best of every occurrence. ... Traveling ought also to teach him distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many truly kind-hearted people there are, with whom he never before had, or ever again will have any further communication, who yet are ready to offer him the most disinterested assistance." Charles Darwin Thomas Gray (1739) on viewing the Alps: "There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument." Paul Theroux, "Travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts." "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." -- D. H. Lawrence "Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name." -- Alice Meynell "When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. ... In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable." -- John Steinbeck "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 civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints." -- Robert Louis Stevenson "One of the gladdest moments of human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the slavery of home, man feels once more happy." -- Sir Richard Burton "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." -- Mark Twain Jack London, in The Call of the Wild:
"Though a plane is not the ideal place to really think, to reassess or reevaluate things, it is a great place to have the illusion of doing so, and often the illusion will suffice." -- Shana Alexander b. 1925, US journalist On the Downside of Travel"There has been, of late, a strange turn in travelers to be displeased." Samuel Johnson Sinclair Lewis on the toil of travel "If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil." Paul White on travel "[the traveler often arrives] at the wrong moment: too hot, too cold, the opera, theatre, museum, is closed for the day, the season, or indefinitely for repairs, or else there is a strike, or an epidemic, or tanks are taking part in a political coup." Mark Twain, on the size of a ship's stateroom "...there was still room to turn around in, but not to swing a cat in, at least with entire security to the cat." Charles Darwin, on long voyages "If a person asked my advice, before undertaking a long voyage, my answer would depend upon his possessing a decided taste for some branch of knowledge, which could by this means be advanced. No doubt it is a high satisfaction to behold various countries and the many races of mankind, but the pleasures gained at the time do not counterbalance the evils." Mark Twain, on travel "This was pleasuring with a vengeance." ... "We would have shone at a wake, but not at anything more festive." Noel Coward, opinion on air travel "How was your flight?" "Well, aeronautically it was a great success. Socially, it left quite a bit to be desired." Edward Gibbon on the travail of travel: "Bad roads and indifferent inns, ... the continual converse one is obliged to have with the vilest part of mankind -- innkeepers, post-masters, and custom house officers." Marquis de Custine, on Russia in 1839. "In Russian administration, minuteness does not exclude disorder. Much trouble is taken to attain unimportant ends, and those employed believe they can never do enough to show their zeal. The result is...that having passed through one formality does not secure the stranger from another." 'Every journey has a chance to become a forced march, commanded by the primacy of next meal and next bed' -- John Krich Robert Benchley, "In America there are two classes of travel-first class and with childen." "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, and the postilion brutal. 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." -- Samuel Johnson "Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. . . . It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability." -- George Bernard Shaw "An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys." -- Iain Sinclair "Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind." -- Paul Theroux "Pack the one bag. Unpack it, pack it, unpack it, pack it: passeport, ticket, book, taxi, airport, check-in, beer, announcement, stairs, airplane, fasten seat-belt, air born, flight, rocking, sun, stars, space, hips of strolling stewardesses, read, sleep, clouds, falling engine speed, descent, circling, touch down, earth, unfasten seat-belt, stairs, airport, immunization book, visa, customs, questions, taxi, streets, houses, people, hotel, key, room, stuffiness, thirst, otherness, foreignness, loneliness, fatigue, life." -- Based on texts from Ryszard Kapuscinski, The Soccer War, Granta Books, 1990, p.198. "Is there anything as horrible as starting a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock." -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, b.1906, US writer. "Traveling may be...an experience we shall always remember, or an experience which, alas, we shall never forget." -- J. Gordon 1896-1952 On Good Advice for the TravelerRudyard Kipling, "The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it" Samuel Johnson's advice for travelers: 'A good holiday is one that is spent among people whose notions of time are vaguer than yours.' -- J. B. Priestley Freya Stark, on her native guide in Persia "On the other hand, there is a certain advantage in traveling with someone who has a reputation for shooting rather than being shot: as Keram said, in a self-satisfied way, they might kill me, but they would know that, if I was with him, there would be unpleasantness afterwards." Samuel Johnson, on packing for travel "We found in the course of our journey the convenience of having disencumbered ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for it is not to be imagined without experience, how in climbing crags and treading bogs, and winding through narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, and a little weight will burden; or how often a man that has pleased himself at home with his own resolution, will, in the hour of darkness and fatigue, be content to leave behind him everything but himself." Samuel Johnson Ralph Waldo Emerson, "'Tis a good rule in every journey to provide some piece of liberal study to rescue the hours which bad weather, bad company, and taverns steal from the best economist." . Edward Gibbon (1760) on the qualifications for a traveler "He should be endowed with an active, indefatigable vigor of mind and body, which can... support , with a careless smile, every hardship of the road, the weather, or the inn." Vicar of Wakefield, on budget class inns: "the usual retreat of Indigence and Frugality." Oscar Wilde, "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train." Evelyn Waugh, on the properties of a good travel writer (speaking of Eric Newby) "...the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited." "He who would travel happily must travel light." -St.Exupery Spanish proverb: "He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." "As the Spanish proverb says, "He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge." -- Samuel Johnson "A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it." -- John Steinbeck "A wise traveller never despise his own country." -- Goldoni. On Tourism"Tourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way." Paul Fussell Sinclair Lewis on sightseeing "He who has seen one cathedral ten times has seen something; he who has seen ten cathedrals once has seen but little; and he who has spent half an hour in each of a hundred cathedrals has seen nothing at all." Kingsley Martin on modern tourism "a disease of the mind, [whose] germ is the idea that one may learn that which is valuable, or in any way acquire virtue, by the process of being shown things." Patrick Leigh Femor, on travel "...that gregarious passion which destroys the object of its love." Charles Lever on one of the early group tours to Paris arranged by Thomas Cook, involving over 1500 participants (1864) "When I first read the scheme in a newspaper advertisement, I caught at the hope that the speculation would break down. I imagined that the characteristic independence of Englishmen would revolt against a plan that reduces the traveler to the level of his trunk and obliterates every trace and trait of the individual. I was all wrong." Evelyn Waugh on the tourist "[The tourist] debauches the great monuments of antiquity, a comic figure, always inapt in his comments, incongruous in his appearance; ...avarice and deceit attack him at every step; the shops that he patronizes are full of forgeries.... But we need feel no scruple or twinge of uncertainty; 'we' are travelers and cosmopolitans; the tourist is the other fellow." "Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going." -- Paul Theroux "The traveler sees what he sees; the tripper sees what he has come to see." -- G.K. Chesterton 1874-1936 On Engaging the NativesRobert Byron, on bargaining in the Middle East "...I have learned that the cost of everything from a royal suite to a bottle of soda water can be halved by the simple expedient of saying it must be halved." Mark Twain, on speaking French "Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles." Evelyn Waugh, on the attitude of locals "...conveying, as it did, in equal degrees, contempt, suspicion, and the suggestion that only listlessness kept them from active insult." Robert Byron, on travel in Syria: "Here [the tourist] is still an aberration. If you can come from London to Syria on business, you must be rich. If you can come so far without business, you must be very rich. No one cares if you like the place, or hate it, or why. You are simply a tourist, as a skunk is a skunk, a parasitic variation of the human species, which exists to be tapped like a milch cow or a gum tree." Freya Stark, "It is only the unexpected that ever makes a customs officer think." Mark Twain, on English 'There is no such thing as 'the Queen's English'. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!' Sir Philip Sydney "For the uttering sweetly and properly the conceit of the mind, English hath it equally with any other tongue in the world." On PlacesSinclair Lewis, "Paris is one of the largest, and certainly it is the pleasantest, of modern American cities." V. S. Naipaul on travel in Egypt "And it was clear that here ... the East began: in this chaos of uneconomical movement, the self-stimulated din, the sudden feeling of insecurity, the conviction that all men were not brothers and that luggage was in danger." "The Pyramids, whose function as a public latrine no guide book mentions, were made impossible by guides, 'watchmen', camel-drivers .... 'Come and have a cup of coffee. I don't want you to buy anything. I just want to have a little intelligent conversation. ... Let us exchange ideas. I am a graduate of the university." V. S. Naipaul, Queen Victoria, benighted at an appalling inn in the Scottish Highlands: "No pudding, and no fun." "We were now in the bosom of the Highlands, with full leisure to contemplate the appearance and properties of mountainous regions, such as have been, in many countries, the last shelters of national distress, and are everywhere the scenes of adventures, stratagems, surprises and escapes." Samuel Johnson Winston Churchill On Russia -- "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." Baedeker, on the Russians (1914): "... They are easily disciplined, and so make excellent soldiers, but have little power of independent thinking or of initiation. The normal Great Russian is thus the mainstay of political and economic inertia and reaction. Even the educated Russian gives comparatively little response to the actual demands of life; he is more or less the victim of fancy and temperament, which sometimes leads him to a despondent slackness, sometimes to emotional outbursts. Here we have the explanation of the want of organization, the disorder, and the waste of time which strike the western visitor to Russia." Lord Byron, on the Greeks: "I like the Greeks, who are plausible rascals, with all the Turkish vices without their courage." Winston Churchill "An American diplomat is sometimes like a bull who carries his own china shop around with him." John Krich, on principals of aesthetic design in Bali 'Where daily life was pared down, the imaginative life could not help but grow terrifyingly complex. ... Less was not more, here. More was more, less was little. Less than that was nothing at all.' John Krich, on India 'The Indians I met loved to talk glowingly about their great, wise civilization, but none of that grandiloquent respect for the whole seemed to be accorded to the human constituents.' ... 'It seemed that we had fled newfangled cruelties to find old ones, traded atom bombs for blight, the indifference bred by alienation for the indifference bred by caste.' John Krich, on beggars in India -- 'Competition was brisk; a survival of the weakest.' Paul Theroux, on Indian enterprise "Indian enterprises seemed to work so well they produced disasters; success made them burst at the seams and the disruption of unprecedented orders led to shortages and finally failure." Paul Theroux, "It is the simplest fact of Indian life: there are too many Indians." Paul Theroux, "One of the cardinal principles of Buddhism, the principle of neglect." Sergio Leone on the idea of 'America' "I began to understand that 'America' in reality belonged to the whole world and not just to Americans. The idea of America had already been invented by the philosophers, the vagabonds, the dispersed of this earth, long before the Spanish ships got there. Those whom we call Americans have only rented it for a time. If they behave badly, we can discover another 'America'. The contract can be canceled at any time." On Ruminations of the Philosophical Kind"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." -- St. Augustine "People don't take trips . . . trips take people." - John Steinbeck 'There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.' - Robert Louis Stevenson Stendhal, on travel: "It is not enough for a landscape to be interesting in itself. Eventually there must be a moral and historic interest." Paul Theroux, "Sightseeing was ... based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled." Paul Fussell, "All the pathos and irony of leaving one's youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time." Paul Fussell, "Travel at its truest is thus an ironic experience, and the best travelers ... seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves as at once serious persons and clowns." Samuel Johnson, "Such seems to be the disposition of man that whatever makes a distinction produces rivalry." Samuel Johnson from "A journey to the Western Island of Scotland" (1775) 'Charity is always help that is offered too late, just as revolution is help that is offered too soon'. -- John Krich. 'The past has to be seen to be dead; or the past will kill.' -- V. S. Naipaul "... the imaginations excited by the view of an unknown and untravelled wilderness are not such as arise in the artificial solitude of parks and gardens... The phantoms which haunt a desert are want, and misery, and danger; the evils of dereliction rush upon the thoughts; man is made unwillingly acquainted with his own weakness, and meditation shows him only how little he can sustain, and how little he can perform." Samuel Johnson H. V. Morton, from A Traveler in Italy, on fellow British tourists "I liked them both, and envied their ability to be conveyed pneumatically across Italy without a care, hearing no voices from the vasty deep, feeling no ghostly fingers: two nice, sensible women, unhampered by the past." "Every exit is an entry somewhere else". - Tom Stoppard "Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it." -Cesare Pavese G. K. Chesterton, "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land." "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." -- Lawrence Durrell "It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep." -- Janet Frame "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." -- Henry Miller "Travelling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, 'I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.'"-- Lisa St. Aubin de Terán "To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive." -- Robert Louis Stevenson "I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them." -- Mark Twain "I travelled among unknown men, "Here I am, safely returned over those peaks from a journey far more beautiful and strange than anything I had hoped for or imagined - how is it that this safe return brings such regret?" -- Peter Mathissen, US writer "So much of who we are is where we have been." -- William Langewiesche, US writer. "Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation." -- Elizabeth Drew, US writer "One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind." -- Dickens. "People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home." -- Dagobert D. Runes, US writer On Travel Writing"Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong-Kong." -- Vita Sackville-West Excerpt from a traveler's handbook: "[This handbook] is intended to supply the traveler with such information as will render him as nearly as possible independent of hotel-keepers, commissionnaires, and guides, and thus enable him the more thoroughly to enjoy and appreciate the objects of interest he meets with on his tour." Paul Fussell, on guidebooks: "If the guidebook used to be critical, today it seems largely a celebratory adjunct to the publicity operations of hotels, resorts, and even countries." Paul Fussell, "And the ideal travel writer is consumed not just with a will to know. He is also moved by a powerful will to teach. Inside every good travel writer there is a pedagogue -- often a highly moral pedagogue -- struggling to get out." Mark Twain, on experienced travelers "But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. ..." "We travellers 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." -- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Samuel Johnson, on fidelity to truth in travelers' tales "In discussing these exceptions from the course of nature, the first question is, whether the fact be justly stated. That which is strange is delightful, and a pleasing error is not willingly detected." Samuel Johnson "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." -- George Eliot "The travel writer seeks the world we have lost -- the lost valleys of the imagination." -- Alexander Cockburn "Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up." -- Ernest Hemingway
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