Brian Eno

It’s not the destination that matters. It’s the change of scene.

William Shenstone

The proper means of increasing the love we bear our native country is to reside some time in a foreign one.

Walt Whitman

Thus we presume to write, as it were, upon things that exist not, and travel by maps yet unmade.

Marco D’Eramo

The transformation of entire cities due to tourism follows a simple economic logic: the needs of the locals do not correspond with the needs of the tourists.

Christian Laesser

Tourism is a phenomenon that creates many private profits but also many socialized losses.

Kristin Scott Thomas

If you’re feeling insecure and you need to feel special, the best place to go is somewhere foreign where people treat you as special because you’re different.

Sargent Shriver

Just to travel is rather boring, but to travel with a purpose is educational and exciting.

Martin Flanagan

When people have truly taken their chances wandering alone in the big wide world, they have great stories to tell.

Eric Weiner

I’d argue travel is an essential industry, an essential activity. It’s not essential the way hospitals and grocery stores are essential. Travel is essential the way books and hugs are essential. Food for the soul.

Eric Weiner

Travel entails wishful thinking. It demands a leap of faith, and of imagination, to board a plane for some faraway land, hoping, wishing, for a taste of the ineffable. Travel is one of the few activities we engage in not knowing the outcome and reveling in that uncertainty. Nothing is more forgettable than the trip that goes exactly as planned.

Agnes Callard

Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.

Agnes Callard

Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?

Agnes Callard

Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.

Agnes Callard

Travel prevents us from feeling the presence of those we have traveled such great distances to be near.

Agnes Callard

The tourist is a deferential character. He outsources the vindication of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place. This deference, this “openness to experience,” is exactly what renders the tourist incapable of experience.

Agnes Callard

When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities.

Agnes Callard

The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do.

Agnes Callard

If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

Valene L. Smith, Agnes Callard

“A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” This definition is taken from the opening of “Hosts and Guests,” the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed? Here is a telling observation … [ Read more ]

Agnes Callard

Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is? Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveler’s delusion.