Quotes about travel

"The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack."

Ade, George on travel   

"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."

Allen, Fred A. on travel   

"My favorite thing is to go where I have never gone."

Arbus, Diane on travel   

"The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work."

Bach, Richard on travel   

"I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists."

Bardot, Brigitte on travel   

"For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes."

Baudelaire, Charles on travel   

"I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it."

Beecham, Sir Thomas on travel   

"In America there are two classes of travel - first class, and with children."

Benchley, Robert on travel   

"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."

Bennett, Arnold on travel   

"I have been a stranger in a strange land."

Bible on travel   

"What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?"

Bishop, Elisabeth on travel   

"Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres?"

Bishop, Elisabeth on travel   

"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."

Boorstin, Daniel J. on travel   

"Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel --movement through space --provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions --perhaps one of the secret terrors --of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did."

Boorstin, Daniel J. on travel   

"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."

Boorstin, Daniel J. on travel   

"There is no looking at a building here after seeing Italy."

Burney, Fanny on travel   

"Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man."

Burroughs, John on travel   

"Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race."

Burton, Sir Richard on travel
3 fans of this quote   

"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."

Byron, Lord on travel   

"I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us."

Byron, Lord on travel   

"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."

Calvino, Italo on travel   

"The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on travel
8 fans of this quote   

"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."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on travel   

"The travel writer seeks the world we have lost --the lost valleys of the imagination."

Cockburn, Alexander on travel   

"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."

Cooley, Charles Horton on travel   

"The routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life."

Cooley, Mason on travel   

"When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels."

Dahlberg, Edward on travel
5 fans of this quote   

"The personal appropriation of clich?s is a condition for the spread of cultural tourism."

Daney, Serge on travel   

"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal."

Debord, Guy on travel   

"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."

Delillo, Don on travel   

"Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen."

Disraeli, Benjamin on travel   

"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."

Durrell, Lawrence on travel
4 fans of this quote   

"Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!"

Dylan, Bob on travel   

"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."

Eliot, George on travel   

"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?"

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on travel   

"Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on travel   

"Travel is a fools paradise."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on travel   

"Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on travel   

"No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on travel   

"The average tourist wants to go to places where there are no tourists."

Ewing, Sam on travel