I love quotations in general, and travel quotes are my favorite! I've listed two of my favorites below but would love to know some of yours. As A.A. Milne said, “a quotation is a handy thing to have about, saving one the trouble of thinking for oneself, always a laborious business." 😉
I haven't been everywhere but it's on my list. - Susan Sontag
I never travel without my diary. One should have something sensational to read in the train. - Oscar Wilde
I always liked that Alfred Wainwright’s ‘Pennine Way Companion’ started with a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Act 1!) and it is applicable to most long distance thru hikers be they on England’s Pennine Way or the the USA’s Appalachian Trail, or wherever:
“What are these, so withered and so wild in their attire,
That look not like inhabitants of the earth,
And yet, are on’t?”
"Never pass up a loo stop". A Rick Steves guide in th 1990s.
Unfortunately I don’t know who first wrote this, but I have it printed out and saved in my office. It was a statement I found when I was preparing for my first solo independent vacation trip when I retired in 2018. Since 2003, I’ve taken trips to Europe with my husband, by myself, and a hybrid where he meets me in Europe, and we have also done RS tours - all great options! But, that first solo trip was the perfect way to celebrate retirement and know I could do it!
“Solo travel is empowering, renewing, intellectually challenging and gives you the opportunity to reintroduce yourself to yourself - much cheaper than therapy and certainly more fun.”
TC, I thought my mother said that first. hee hee
Also, same reminder before leaving the house.
"Wherever you go, there you are." - Mike Brady
"Go to work. Open computer. Scroll for plane tickets for 6 hours. Close computer. Go home." -Unknown
"I've been everywhere, man." -Johnny Cash (recently re-written to read, "non-gendered, no-binary human")
" If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears." Cesare Pavese
EDIT: “We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”
Wallace Stegner
EDIT. 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
My favorite is, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure.” Freya Stark. I have felt this and it’s true!
“Travel is the only thing you can buy, that makes you richer.”
“My favorite thing, is to go where I’ve never been.”
“Travel IS my therapy.”
No idea who said them!
“Not all those who wander are lost” J.R.R. Tolkien
“The mountains are calling and I must go.” John Muir
“Into the forest I go to lose my mind and find my soul.” John Muir
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.” Saint Augustine
Keep on traveling. Rick Steves
“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float, to gain all while you give - to roam the roads of lands remote - to travel is to live.”
- Hans Christian Anderson
“Indeed there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.”
- Ryszard Kapuscinski
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step” Lao Tzu (Chinese philosopher)
I believe I saw this on Sarah Murdoch’s FB page where someone asked if they should travel solo:
“Just go!”
Here's a similar post from about 5 years ago. Most of my favorites have been covered in this post and the one posted today.
https://community.ricksteves.com/travel-forum/trip-reports/famous-travel-quotes
My own words:
'A long flight is just one night's bad sleep."
"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -- T.S. Eliot
“We Travel Not To Escape Life But For Life Not To Escape Us”
“Traveling - it leaves you speechless, then turns you into a storyteller”
Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
Yogi Berra
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
- Mark Twain
I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.
I travel for travel’s sake.
The great affair is to move. Robert Louis Stevenson
AND
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe,
My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go. Robert Burns
"Stay together! Whatever happens just stay together!" American man wrangling large family at Vienna railway station in 2019. The poor man was burdened down with spinner bags and seemed quite stressed.
Overheard leaving the Louvre 53 years ago, one loud American woman to another: "Well, we sure have been around the mulberry bush!"
"The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
We can sleep at home~ Me
" Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow. " A.E. Housman
"There's such a lot of world to see"
Henry Mancini (from Moon River)
You cannot avoid looking like a tourist. Just don't look like a stupid, American tourist.
There are so many cool quotations here! I love reading all of them!
Ianandjulie, I love that Macbeth quote and how it's applied. Macbeth is one of my favorite Shakespeare play. I stage managed a production of it when I was in college (I was a theatre major) and loved working on it.
And periscope, another beautiful line (the one from the New Yorker).
The "never pass up a loo stop" makes me think of another rhyme I've heard:
Never stand when you can sit.
Never sit when you can lay down.
And never pass up the chance to go to the toilet.
My favorite travel quote:
“The more I see, the less I know.”
John Lennon
I have a collection of so many! (95 to be exact…) Most I have simply come across and don’t know the attribution.
“The answer is travel. Who cares what the question is.”
“Travel helps you remember who you forgot to be.”
“Live with no excuses and travel with no regrets.”
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” - Anthony Bourdain
“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination with reality, and instead of thinking of how things may be, see them as they are.”
- Samuel Johnson
Mardee - I would love to know the attribution of your "Never stand..." rhyme. My husband swears that my mother told him that, though I never heard her say it. (From Oklahoma City, she traveled the world for many years with Friendship Force.)
Mardee - I always think you can tell if it’s a good production of Macbeth when they have to mop the fake blood off the stage between acts/at the interval!
Ian
Have Fun - Will Travel
Quote from my 1969 People-to-People tour Swedish home stay "brother': You can always tell the Americans. They are the loudest, most obnoxious people around. I have always made it point not to be that person.
"I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world." Unknown
"To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before!" Captian Kirk
From Rick Steves, “ “Be fanatically positive and militantly optimistic. If something is not to your liking, change your liking.”
Regarding traveling in a group…….
“You can only move as fast as the slowest person.”
Someone on the Forum said this long ago, I just don’t remember who said it
I think I said this ........ "Go to work. Open computer. Scroll for plane tickets for 6 hours. Close computer. Go home." -Unknown :):) Now I work from home so WAY easier.
"Travel like you're coming back."...... my RS travel consult helping us plan our first trip to Europe!!! And indeed, we have gone back :)
Keep on traveling. Rick Steves
"Don't panic and bring a towel. " Douglas Adams
Francis ... love it made - me smile!
Here's a crispy one that I generally agree with, and that occasionally, but not often, can be pointed at me:
Luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet.
I like this one:
“Travel as much as you can, as far as you can, as long as you can. Life’s not meant to be lived in one place.”
Jean! I love that!!
I do believe it’s time for a new adventure.
~anonymous (at least to me)
This thread has been a lot of fun. We need some of these during the cold, dark days of winter.
Thanks, everyone!
The more I travel, the more humble I feel about what is out there still to find.
Zoe DeBlasio (10/25/2012)
Love that! Thanks Priscilla!
It's a lot of work having all this fun (my DH)
Maybe not quite what you had in mind but I have always loved:
“The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
It's not really a travel quote, but could be if one warranted!
"Not all those who wander are lost."
I am aware this is from The Fellowship of the Ring by Tolkien-but it suits my purposes (and is tattooed on my arm--not because of the travel connotation, but because of the deeper life lessons from my past experiences!)
If you want everything to be like it is back home -- stay home.
For anyone who thinks they cannot travel alone: Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone. Rudyard Kipling. First read on this blog about 20 years ago! J
Priscilla, that is a lovely quote from dear Zoe! I was just reading some links this week of Zoe’s posts that you consolidated for us on the forum when she passed away. I was cleaning out my list of bookmarked Travel Forum posts; those I kept!
"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."
— Samuel Johnson
"Nothing unexpected or wonderful is likely to happen if you have an itinerary in Paris filled with the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower."
-- Anthony Bourdain
“I have found out there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
-— Mark Twain
Love this travel quote….. feel this way quite often!
“ I’m restless
Things are calling me away
My hair is being pulled by the stars again”
-Anais Nin
When in Rome, do as the Romans do.
Proverb attributed to Saint Ambrose...
Follow the customs and practices of those who live in it.
"Hail Rome / high and balmy;
Home of Caesar / and salami.
Buy a treasure / rich and strange
Count your blessings / count your change!"
-- Victor Buono
Love these!
My favorite is Jane Austen: If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.
and this gem: Better to see something once than to hear about a thousand times.
"Hop on a plane and fly across the ocean. Easiest thing in the world." - Garth Pancake.
A travel advisory warning from Isaac Asimov, science fiction writer, biochemist, lover of bawdy limericks. Ever so slightly paraphrased:
"A pimply youth named Bram
Visited Amsterdam
To the red lights he went
Where his money was spent
Now his (nose) is as small as a clam."
