Pliny the Younger

We travel long roads and cross water to see what we disregard when it is under our eyes. This is either because nature has so arranged things so that we go after what is far off and remain indifferent to what is nearby, or because any desire loses its intensity by being easily satisfied, or because we postpone whatever we can see whenever we want, … [ Read more ]

Augustus Hare

Better far off to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen and to see well the rest; to see them not once, but again and often again; to watch them, to learn them, to live with them, to love them, till they have become a part of life and life’s recollections.

Jeff Goins

You won’t always be young. And life won’t always be just about you. So travel, young person. Experience the world for all it’s worth. Become a person of culture, adventure, and compassion. While you still can.

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And if you’re not as young as you’d like (few of us are), travel anyway. It may not be easy or practical, but it’s worth it. Traveling allows you … [ Read more ]

Carson McCullers

We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Ernest Hemingway

I had an inheritance from my father
It was the moon and the sun
And though I roam all over the world
The spending of it’s never done.

From For Whom the Bell Tolls (Gypsy Rafael singing)

Stephanie Dandan

We travel not just to travel and marvel at people, places, things. That’s not just it. That was never just it for us. We travel to learn, to experience, and to feel all the spectrums of being human in this world.

We feel the most alive when we’re out there. Living nomadically with nothing but our possessions in a backpack and moving as our only … [ Read more ]

Aviya Kushner

It is not that Americans lack curiosity of any kind—but that we seem to lack the right kind. Europe is overrun with young American tourists. Unfortunately, these college students tend to pack a dozen countries into a month or less. They often tote guides such as Let’s Go, which highlight the greatest hits and cheapest places and are written by, you guessed it, other American … [ Read more ]

Isabelle Eberhardt

Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere.

Isabelle Eberhardt

A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.

Isabelle Eberhardt

A subject to which few intellectuals ever give a thought is the right to be a vagrant, the freedom to wander. Yet vagrancy is deliverance, and life on the open road is the essence of freedom. To have the courage to smash the chains with which modern life has weighted us (under the pretext that it was offering us more liberty), then to take up … [ Read more ]

Matt Mullenweg

The best part about traveling is the forced minimalism. My life at home, as it has evolved, is quite complex and full of stuff. On the road I’m reduced to what I carry in a small backpack and hand bag — clutter becomes a physical burden. I really enjoy this simplicity as it helps me focus. One of my favorite things to watch as a … [ Read more ]

Oliver Wendell Holmes

There are periods in which all places and people seem to be in a conspiracy to impress us with their individuality, in which every ordinary locality seems to assume a special significance and to claim a particular notice, in which every person we meet is either an old acquaintance or a character; days in which the strangest coincidences are continually happening, so that they get … [ Read more ]

Bertrand Russell

Those who can afford it are perpetually moving from place to place, carrying with them as they go gaiety, dancing and drinking, but for some reason always expecting to enjoy these more in a new place. Those who have to earn a living get their share of boredom, of necessity, in working hours, but those who have enough money to be freed from the need … [ Read more ]

Mark Jenkins

Adventure is a path. Real adventure – self-determined, self-motivated, often risky – forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind – and … [ Read more ]

Moorish proverb

He who does not travel does not know the value of men.

Ibn Battuta

Traveling – it makes you speechless and then turns you into a storyteller.

Claude Levi Strauss

The ancient geographer Strabo was convinced that anyone telling about his travels must be a liar, and in a sense he was right, for if a traveler doesn’t visit his narrative with the spirit and technique of fiction, no one will want to hear it.

Milton Glaser

Travel penetrates your consciousness, but not in a rational way.