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Wandering Words

Anyone who has traveled, even if only a few miles, knows that making a journey broadens the mind. Doing it regularly – and widely – even more so. Some travelers sum this experience up better than others, and here are 52 of the most interesting quotes about travel we've found. If you know of any others (or have any wisdom of your own), please let us know. Meanwhile, enjoy these, and let them inspire you to travel even more.

1. ‘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

2. ‘Make voyages! Attempt them… there's nothing else.' – Tennesse Williams

3. ‘The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.' – Marcel Proust

4. ‘A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.' – Lao Tzu

5. ‘The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see.' – GK Chesterton

6. ‘Experience, travel – these are as education in themselves.' – Euripides

7. ‘We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.' – John Hope Franklin

8. ‘You lose sight of things… and when you travel, everything balances out.' – Daranna Gidel

9. ‘I see my path, but I don't know where it leads. Not knowing where I'm going is what inspires me to travel it.' – Rosalio de Castro

10. 'I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost eveything.' – Bill Bryson

11. ‘Travel teaches toleration.' – Benjamin Disraeli

12. ‘To get away from one's working environment is, in a sense, to get away from one's self; and this is often the chief advantage of travel and change.' – Charles Horton Cooley

13. ‘Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.' – Regina Nadelson

14. 'All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.' – Martin Buber

15. ‘Two of the greatest gifts we can give our children are roots and wings.' – Hodding Carter

16. ‘Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.' – Frank Herbert

17. ‘Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter.' -Izaak Walton

18. ‘Traveling tends to magnify all human emotions.' – Peter Hoeg

19. ‘Our happiest moments as tourists always seem to come when we stumble upon one thing while in pursuit of something else.' – Lawrence Block

20. ‘Hitler didn't travel. Stalin didn't travel. Saddam Hussein never traveled. They didn't want to have their orthodoxy challenged.' – Howard Gardner

21. ‘As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.' – Margaret Mead

22. ‘Our Nature lies in movement; complete calm is death.' – Pascal

23. ‘Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.' – Michael Crichton

24. ‘Traveling is like flirting with life. It's like saying, “I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.”' – Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

25. ‘There is no happiness for the man who does not travel.' – Aitarey Brahmana

26. ‘The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.' – Rudyard Kipling

27. ‘One of the gladdest moments of human 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 slavery of home, man feels once more happy.' – Sir Richard Burton

28. ‘People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.' – Dagobert D. Runes

29. ‘It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I've gone and come back, I'll find it at home.' – Rumi

30. ‘I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.' – Mary Anne Radmacher Hershey

31. ‘I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.' – Susan Sontag

32. ‘If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.' – James Michener

33. ‘The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.' – St. Augustine

34. ‘There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.' – Robert Louis Stevenson

35. ‘A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.' – John Steinbeck

36. ‘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

37. ‘One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.' – Henry Miller

38. ‘A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.' – Moslih Eddin Saadi

39. ‘To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.' – Freya Stark

40. ‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.' – Mark Twain

41. ‘We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.' – Jawaharial Nehru

42. ‘To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.' – Bill Bryson

43. ‘Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.' – Ralph Waldo Emerson

44. ‘A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.' – Lao Tzu

45. ‘Not all those who wander are lost.' – J. R. R. Tolkien

46. ‘Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.' – Maya Angelou

47. ‘Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe.' – Anatole France

48. ‘Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.' – Seneca

49. ‘I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.' – Lillian Smith

50. 'A man’s mind grows narrow in a narrow place.' – Samuel Johnson

51. ‘No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.' – Lin Yutang

52. ‘Trust in Allah, but tie your camel.' – Old Muslim proverb

- Roshan McArthur

Images: NASA; copyright Yann Arthus-Bertrand 2008

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