The Power of Words
I love the power that words have to inspire, motivate and engage the reader, words that are immortalised, words of wit, pain, and truth; to the writer, if not always the reader. Many a writer, intellectual, artist or traveller has made comment on the virtue of travel, a subject of which most of our readers are obviously passionate. I have collated below a selection of fifty of my favourite travel quotes, some may strike a chord, but please add your own favourites in the comments box below the article; who can come up with a modern version of a classic quote, or even better their own inspirational original. These quotes are not arranged in a particular order of favouritism:
1 ‘We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfilment.’ – Hilaire Belloc
2 ‘When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.’ – Clifton Paul Fadiman
3 ‘All intellectual improvement arises from leisure.’ – Samuel Johnson
4 ‘There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign.’ – Robert Louis Stevenson
5 ‘For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return. ‘ – Leonardo da Vinci
6 ‘The World is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.’ – Saint Augustine
7 ‘Travel teaches toleration.’ – Benjamin Disraeli
8 ‘For my part, I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. ‘ – Robert Louis Stevenson
9 ‘Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience.’ – Francis Bacon
10 ‘Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.’ – Thomas Fuller
11 ‘All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.’ – Samuel Johnson
12 ‘I’ve met the most interesting people while flying or on a boat. These methods of travel seem to attract the kind of people I want to be with.’ – Hedy Lamarr
13 ‘The person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere.’ – Xun Zi
14 ‘The world is a country which nobody ever yet knew by description; one must travel through it one’s self to be acquainted with it.’ – Lord Chesterfield
15 ‘Own only what you can always carry with you: know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.’ – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
16 ‘An English man does not travel to see English men.’ – Laurence Sterne
17 ‘To travel is to take a journey into yourself.’ – Danny Kaye
18 ‘What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.’ – George Byron
19 ‘In America there are two classes of travel – first class, and with children.’ – Robert Benchley
20 ‘No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.’ – Lin Yutang
21 ‘We travel to learn; and I have never been in any country where they did not do something better than we do it, think some thoughts better than we think, catch some inspiration from heights above our own.’ – Maria Mitchell
22 ‘A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.’ – John Steinbeck
23 ‘Focus on the journey, not the destination. Joy is found not in finishing an activity but in doing it.’ – Greg Anderson
24 ‘Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.’ – Benjamin Disraeli
25 ‘Not all those who wander are lost.’ – J. R. R. Tolkien
26 ‘The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.’ – Rudyard Kipling
27 ‘Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.’ – Paul Theroux
28 ‘Travel gives me the opportunity to walk through the sectors of cities where one can clearly see the passage of time. ‘ – Jerzy Kosinski
29 ‘He travels fastest who travels alone.’ H.D. Thoreau
30 ‘The road of life twists and turns and no two directions are ever the same. Yet our lessons come from the journey, not the destination.’ – Don Williams Jr.
31 ‘Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.’ – Lao Tzu
32 ‘A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find that after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.’ John Steinbeck
33 ‘Let me recommend the best medicine in the world: a long journey, at a mild season, through a pleasant country, in easy stages.’ – James Madison
34 ‘I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.’- Oscar Wilde
35 ‘Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.’ – Ernest Hemingway
36 ‘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.’ – Gilbert K. Chesterton
37 ‘Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities.’ – Lewis Mumford
38 ‘The photograph reverses the purpose of travel, which until now had been to encounter the strange and unfamiliar.’ – Marshall McLuhan
39 ‘You do not travel if you are afraid of the unknown, you travel for the unknown, that reveals you with yourself.’ – Ella Maillart
40 ‘If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.’ – James Michener
41 ‘Lovers of air travel find it exhilarating to hang poised between the illusion of immortality and the fact of death.’ – Alexander Chase
42 ‘Airline travel is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.‘ – Al Boliska
43 ‘Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.’ – Charles Kuralt
44 ‘Room service? Send up a larger room.’ – Groucho Marx
45 ‘Climb the mountain so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.’ – David McCullough
46 ‘I had moved out of the Edison Hotel because I couldn’t pay the bill and was living at the Lincoln Hotel, where I couldn’t pay the bill either, but it was cheaper.’ – Allan Sherman
47 ‘I pretend I’m one of the royal family when I’m in a hotel and that the hotel belongs to me – it is a palace.’ – Martin Short
48 ‘I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wake-up letter.’ – Steven Wright
49 ‘I’ve always thought a hotel ought to offer optional small animals. I mean a cat to sleep on your bed at night, or a dog of some kind to act pleased when you come in. You ever notice how a hotel room feels so lifeless?’ – Anne Tyler
50 ‘Never relinquish clothing to a hotel valet without first specifically telling him that you want it back.’ – Fran Lebowitz
51 ‘The cool thing about being famous is travelling. I have always wanted to travel across seas, like to Canada and stuff.’ – Britney Spears (Geography lesson for Ms Spears please!)
52 ‘A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.’ – Lao Tzu
53 ‘All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.’ – Martin Buber
54 ‘Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all’ – Helen Keller
55 ‘Take only memories, leave only footprints’ – Chief Seattle Rehashed many times this quote is attributed to the Suquamish Chief after whom the city of Seattle was named, and an early advocate for environmentalism.
56 ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.’ – Marcel Proust
57 ‘Travel makes one modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.’ – Gustave Flaubert
58 ‘Never go on trips with anyone you do not love.’ – Ernest Hemingway
59 ‘Traveling – it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller.’- Ibn Battuta
60 ‘If you think adventure is dangerous, try routine, it’s lethal.’ – Paulo Coehlo
61 ‘Stop worrying about the potholes in the road and enjoy the journey.’ – Babs Hoffman
62 ‘Jobs fill your pocket but adventures fill your soul.’ – Jamie Lyn Beatty
What’s your favourite travel related quote? Please leave a comment below.
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