quotations about travel
He travels safest in the dark night who travels lightest.
FERNANDO CORTEZ
attributed, Conquest of Mexico
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 the last fantasy the 2Oth Century left us, the delusion that going somewhere helps you reinvent yourself.
J. G. BALLARD
Millennium People
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
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 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
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
Foreign travel is like a tarantula bite--once beginning to dance, one must dance on. The exertion may be more painful than pleasurable, still we keep it up. The lookers-on--the quiet, phlegmatic, or selfish stayers at home--think us very foolish; perhaps we ourselves have our doubts whether we are not rather foolish too. Nevertheless we go dancing on, and dance until we die.
DINAH CRAIK
We Four in Normandy
Voyaging great distances -- through forests, from island to island, across plains and into the mountains -- is all about finding ourselves.
TIM LEBBON
Fallen
The traveled mind is the catholic mind educated from exclusiveness and egotism.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT
Table Talk
The soul of the journey is liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases.
WILLIAM HAZLITT
Table Talk
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
Every traveler has a tale to tell.
DAVID C. SMITH & RICHARD L. TIERNEY
The Ring of Ikribu
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
If your goal is to broaden your world, travel is de rigueur.
LEWIS WALKER
"Travel dreams 2017", Dunwoody Crier, May 16, 2017
Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness.
RAY BRADBURY
attributed, Emily the Strange: Piece of Mind
Travel is ... a means of conquering space and time.
JILLY TRAGANOU
Travel, Space, Architecture
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 reading of tourist prospectuses is one of the joys of the world -- it is like operetta in prose -- all so flowery and heavenlike.
MARSDEN HARTLEY
Somehow a Past
Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars.
JACK KEROUAC
On the Road