I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
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 (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
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 (1924–2004) New Zealand Novelist, Short-Story Writer
The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.
—Paul Goodman (1911–72) American Novelist, Essayist
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.
—Nadine Gordimer (1923–2014) South African Novelist, Short-Story Writer
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost—the lost valleys of the imagination.
—Alexander Claud Cockburn (1941–2012) Irish American Political Journalist
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.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English Humanist, Pacifist, Essayist, Short Story Writer, Satirist
The map is not the territory.
—Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish-American Scientist, Philosopher of Language
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 (1709–84) British Essayist
The traveler, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.
—Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) British Novelist, Playwright, Critic
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.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Humorist, Radio Personality
Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives—from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango—with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists stage.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney, Writer
The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.
—Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American Historian, Academic, Attorney, Writer
Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.
—Guy Debord (1931–94) French Philosopher
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
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.
—Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762) English Aristocrat, Poet, Novelist, Writer
Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
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 (1923–85) Italian Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
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 (1912–90) British Biographer, Poet, Playwright, Novelist
Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
—John Keats (1795–1821) English Poet
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 (1902–68) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist
Of journeying the benefits are many: the freshness it bringeth to the heart, the seeing and hearing of marvelous things, the delight of beholding new cities, the meeting of unknown friends, and the learning of high manners.
—Pasquier Quesnel (1634–1719) French Jansenist Theologian
You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist’s custom.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
The alternative to a vacation is to stay home and tip every third person you see.
—Unknown
I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) American Philosopher
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, you express me better than I can express myself.
—Walt Whitman (1819–92) American Poet, Essayist, Journalist, American, Poet, Essayist, Journalist
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.
—Laozi (fl.6th Century BCE) Chinese Philosopher, Sage
The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
—Charles Cooley (1864–1929) American Sociologist
The average tourist wants to go to places where there are no tourists.
—Sam Ewing (b.1949) American Sportsperson
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.
—D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Literary Critic
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