Travel
Quotes - Traveling is a fool's paradise
“Imagine
your worst day, multiply it by a hundred, and pray to your God
that
you never experience what some of the people in this war zone go
through,
everyday, without any hope of it getting better. Ever. Compared
to
these people, every day, no matter how bad, is the best day ever. I
know
nothing about pain, nothing about suffering and hopefully never will.”
―
Hendri Coetzee, Living the Best Day Ever
“Anyone
who needs more than one suitcase is a tourist, not a traveler”
―
Ira Levin, Rosemary’s Baby
“Travel
is glamorous only in retrospect.”
―
Paul Theroux
“This
was how it was with travel: one city gives you gifts, another robs you. One
gives you the heart’s affections, the other destroys your soul. Cities and
countries are as alive, as feeling, as fickle and uncertain as people. Their
degrees of love and devotion are as varying as with any human relation. Just as
one is good, another is bad.”
―
Roman Payne, Cities & Countries
“Traveling
is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of
places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with
beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the
sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the
sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the
palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not
intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”
―
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First
Series
“I
pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in
Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting,
identical, that I fled from.”
―
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“The
pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with
which we travel than on the destination we travel to.”
―
Alain de Botton, The Art of Travel
“If
I'm an advocate for anything, it's to move. As far as you can, as much as you
can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can
walk in someone else's shoes or at least eat their food, it's a plus for
everybody.
Open
your mind, get up off the couch, move.”
―
Anthony Bourdain
“Don't
let your luggage define your travels, each life unravels differently.”
―
Shane Koyczan
“The
struggles we endure today will be the ‘good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.”
―
Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip
“There's
a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've
left it.”
―
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin
“Distance
changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two
miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very
limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only
you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little
secret.
Life
takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is
dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in
between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.
You
have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions
and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil
tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats
of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that
is required of you is a willingness to trudge.
There
is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However
far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s
where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one
boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect
indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled
mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless
circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.
At
times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago,
crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice
today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you
exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with
string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours
and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of
the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you
think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.”
―
Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian
Trail
