G. W. Sears

We do not go to the green woods and crystal waters to rough it, we go to smooth it. We get it rough enough at home, in towns and cities.

Pico Iyer

Going nowhere… isn’t about turning your back on the world; it’s about stepping away now and then so that you can see the world more clearly and love it more deeply.

Pico Iyer

Travel is like love, mostly because it’s a heightened state of awareness, in which we are mindful, receptive, undimmed by familiarity and ready to be transformed. That is why the best trips, like the best love affairs, never really end.

Pico Iyer

Travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty.

Pico Iyer

Isn’t infidelity part of the sales tax, part of the lure, of travel? It is, of course, and it’s nothing but the shadow side of the dissolution of self, the release from normal boundaries that flight induces. Indeed, it’s part of what moves us to take flights in the first place: to walk through that archway of lights and become a different person. A girl … [ Read more ]

Pico Iyer

The traveler’s first rule – everything is interesting if you look at it with the right eyes.

Pico Iyer

A day, a human day, has a certain shape and structure to it; a day, in most respects, resembles a room in which our things are ordered according to our preference. It may be empty or it may be full, but in either case it is familiar. Over here is the place where you rest (10 p.m. to 6 a.m., perhaps), over there is the … [ Read more ]

Pico Iyer

I worry […] that travel is becoming more a form of consumerism, whether you live in Santa Monica or Shanghai, than a real exercise in curiosity, and that, as the world grows more open and available, going to another country will seem more like going to a cool ethnic supermarket or trendy restaurant than a true journey into shock or difference. I worry, in other … [ Read more ]

Pico Iyer

For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with.

Ralph Crawshaw

Travel has a way of stretching the mind. The stretch comes not from travel’s immediate rewards, the inevitable myriad new sights, smells and sounds, but with experiencing firsthand how others do differently what we believed to be the right and only way.

Judith Fein

I travel because I am looking for mystery and magic. I want to encounter things that I cannot understand with my rational mind. I want experiences that are not mundane – experiences that move me, change me, wake me up, enlighten me, make me laugh, cry, feel. FEEL. I want to get out of my head and into my heart.

Richard Francis Burton

One of the gladdest moments in life, methinks is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of habit, the leaden weight of routine, the cloak of many cares and the clutch of home, one feels once more happy.

Florine Bos

I travel because I’d rather look back at life, saying “I can’t believe I did that” instead of “If only I had.”

Christopher McCandless

The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.

Judith Thurman

Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground.

Xun Zi

Thus, that one can find no place to walk through the breadth of the earth is not because the earth is not tranquil but because the danger to every step of the traveler lies generally with words.

Hannah Arendt

Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.

Henry Rollins

I just travel the world with my backpack and my cameras and a bunch of Clif bars. I hit the streets every day with no real plan besides walking and seeing what happens or taking a taxi across town and finding my way back. Or I look out the top of the hotel and see an area and say, okay, I’m going there today-that slum, … [ Read more ]

Henry Rollins

A great way to learn about your country is to leave it.

Henry Rollins

I beg young people to travel. If you don’t have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you’re going to see your country differently, you’re going to see your president … [ Read more ]