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
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
—John Steinbeck (1902–68) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist
You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist’s custom.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
It is not fit that every man should travel; it makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
—Owen Feltham (1602–1668) English Essayist
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
Those that say you can’t take it with you never saw a car packed for a vacation trip.
—Unknown
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
—Henry James (1843–1916) American-born British Novelist, Writer
The average tourist wants to go to places where there are no tourists.
—Sam Ewing (b.1949) American Sportsperson
Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
The bigger the summer vacation the harder the fall.
—Indian Proverb
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
—Samuel Johnson (1709–84) British Essayist
Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!
—Bob Dylan (b.1941) American Singer-songwriter
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
I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring.
—Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron) (1788–1824) English Romantic Poet
They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.
—Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 BCE) Roman Poet
Only that traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
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
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.
—Don DeLillo (b.1936) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
—Richard Bach (b.1936) American Novelist, Aviator
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
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 (1892–1962) English Gardener, Author, Poet
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 (1885–1930) English Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Essayist, Literary Critic
Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.
—Benjamin Franklin (1706–90) American Political Leader, Inventor, Diplomat
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
The life of man is a journey; a journey that must be traveled, however bad the roads or the accommodation.
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) Irish Novelist, Playwright, Poet
I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.
—Brigitte Bardot (b.1934) French Film Star
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost—the lost valleys of the imagination.
—Alexander Claud Cockburn (1941–2012) Irish American Political Journalist
He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
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
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
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
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.
—G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) English Journalist, Novelist, Essayist, Poet
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
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
I was disappointed in Niagara—most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish Poet, Playwright
One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to come up to you and show you a nice brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken, and this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the Jack of Spades jump out of the deck and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not bet this man, for as sure as you are standing there, you are going to end up with an earful of cider.
—Damon Runyon (1884–1946) American Journalist, Short-Story Writer
The map is not the territory.
—Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950) Polish-American Scientist, Philosopher of Language
If it’s tourist season, why can’t we kill them?
—Unknown
The routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life.
—Mason Cooley (1927–2002) American Aphorist
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
I traveled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; nor England! did I know till then what love I bore to thee.
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Poet
Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.
—John Burroughs (1837–1921) American Naturalist, Writer
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 (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
I would like to spend my whole life traveling, if I could borrow another life to spend at home.
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English Essayist
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 (1835–1910) American Humorist
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
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