An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON TRAVEL
The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack.
George Ade (1866-1944, American humorist, playwright)
The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.
Fred A. Allen (1894-1957, American radio comic)
My favorite thing is to go where I have never gone.
Diane Arbus (1923-1971, American photographer)
The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.
Richard Bach (1936-, American author)
In America there are two classes of travel -- first class, and with children.
Horace Benchley
I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.
Brigitte Bardot (1934-, French actress)
For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867, French poet)
I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it.
Sir Thomas Beecham (1879-1961, British conductor)
The traveler, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931, British novelist)
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres?
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979, American poet)
What childishness is it that while there's breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979, American poet)
Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives -- from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango -- with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists’ stage.
Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004, American historian)
Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel -- movement through space -- provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions -- perhaps one of the secret terrors -- of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.
Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004, American historian)
The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.
Daniel J. Boorstin (1914-2004, American historian)
There is no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.
Fanny Burney (1752-1840, British writer, diarist)
Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.
John Burroughs (1837-1921, American naturalist, author)
Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.
Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890, Explorer, born in Torquay)
I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.
Lord Byron (1788-1824, British poet)
I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring.
Lord Byron (1788-1824, British poet)
The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.
Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929, American sociologist)
Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.
Italo Calvino (1923-1985, Cuban writer, essayist, journalist)
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see.
Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936, British author)
The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936, British author)
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost -- the lost valleys of the imagination.
Alexander Cockburn (1941-, Anglo-Irish journalist)
The routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life.
Mason Cooley
When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.
Edward Dahlberg (1900-1977, American author, critic)
The personal appropriation of cliches is a condition for the spread of cultural tourism.
Serge Daney (1944-1992, French film critic)
Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption, is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.
Guy Debord (1931-, French philosopher)
To be a tourist is to escape accountability. Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home. You're able to drift across continents and languages, suspending the operation of sound thought. Tourism is the march of stupidity. You're expected to be stupid. The entire mechanism of the host country is geared to travelers acting stupidly. You walk around dazed, squinting into fold-out maps. You don't know how to talk to people, how to get anywhere, what the money means, what time it is, what to eat or how to eat it. Being stupid is the pattern, the level and the norm. You can exist on this level for weeks and months without reprimand or dire consequence. Together with thousands, you are granted immunities and broad freedoms. You are an army of fools, wearing bright polyesters, riding camels, taking pictures of each other, haggard, dysenteric, thirsty. There is nothing to think about but the next shapeless event.
Don Delillo (1926-, American author)
Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember and remember more than I have seen.
Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881, British statesman, Prime Minister)
Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will -- whatever we may think.
Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990, British author)
Sailing round the world in a dirty gondola oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!
Bob Dylan (1941-, American musician, singer, songwriter)
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans, is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
George Eliot (1819-1880, British novelist)
I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882, American poet, essayist)
No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby-so helpless and so ridiculous.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882, American poet, essayist)
Travel is a fool's paradise.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882, American poet, essayist)
Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882, American poet, essayist)
The average tourist wants to go to places where there are no tourists.
Sam Ewing
It would be nice to travel if you knew where you were going and where you would live at the end or do we ever know, do we ever live where we live, we're always in other places, lost, like sheep.
Janet Frame (1924-, New Zealand novelist, poet)
The fool wanders, a wise man travels.
Thomas Fuller (1608-1661, British clergyman, author)
Travel makes a wise man better, and a fool worse.
Thomas Fuller (1608-1661, British clergyman, author)
Traveling is like gambling: it is always connected with winning and losing, and generally where it is least expected we receive, more or less than what we hoped for.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832, German poet, dramatist, novelist)
A wise traveler never depreciates their own country.
Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793, Italian playwright)
A man who leaves home to mend himself and others is a philosopher; but he who goes from country to country, guided by the blind impulse of curiosity, is a vagabond.
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774, Anglo-Irish author, poet, playwright)
The important thing about travel in foreign lands is that it breaks the speech habits and makes you blab less, and breaks the habitual space-feeling because of different village plans and different landscapes. It is less important that there are different mores, for you counteract these with your own reaction-formations.
Paul Goodman (1911-1972, American author, poet, critic)
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-, South African author)
Of journeying the benefits are many: the freshness it bringeth to the heart, the seeing and hearing of marvelous things, the delight of beholding new cities, the meeting of unknown friends, and the learning of high manners.
Sadi Gulistan
I would like to spend my whole life traveling, if I could borrow another life to spend at home.
William Hazlitt (1778-1830, British essayist)
Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.
Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961, American writer)
They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.
Horace (BC 65-8, Italian poet)
To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963, British author)
Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty -- his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963, British author)
Being on tour sends me crazy, I drink too much and out comes the John Mcenroe in me.
Chrissie Hynde
Though there are some disagreeable things in Venice there is nothing so disagreeable as the visitors.
Henry James (1843-1916, American author)
Traveling makes a man wiser, but less happy.
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826, American President (3rd))
As the Spanish proverb says, ''He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.'' So it is in traveling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
He that travels in theory has no inconveniences; he has shade and sunshine at his disposal, and wherever he alights finds tables of plenty and looks of gaiety. These ideas are indulged till the day of departure arrives, the chaise is called, and the progress of happiness begins. A few miles teach him the fallacies of imagination. The road is dusty, the air is sultry, the horses are sluggish. He longs for the time of dinner that he may eat and rest. The inn is crowded, his orders are neglected, and nothing remains but that he devour in haste what the cook has spoiled, and drive on in quest of better entertainment. He finds at night a more commodious house, but the best is always worse than he expected.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
In traveling, a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
Worth seeing? Yes; but not worth going to see.
Samuel Johnson (1709-1784, British author)
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, and many goodly states and kingdoms seen.
John Keats (1795-1821, British poet)
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855, Danish philosopher, writer)
If you look like your passport picture you're too ill to travel.
Will Kommen
The map is not the territory.
Alfred Korzybski (1880-1950, German writer)
A route differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point with another. A route has no meaning in itself; its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself and invites us to stop. A route is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time.
Milan Kundera (1929-, Czech author, critic)
Thanks to the interstate highway system, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything.
Charles Kuralt (1934-, American TV commentator)
Without stirring abroad, one can know the whole world; Without looking out of the window one can see the way of heaven. The further one goes the less one knows.
Lao-Tzu (BC 600-?, Chinese philosopher, founder of Taoism)
Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930, British author)
Comes over one an absolute necessity to move. And what is more, to move in some particular direction. A double necessity then: to get on the move, and to know whither.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930, British author)
We travelers are in very hard circumstances. If we say nothing but what has been said before us, we are dull and have observed nothing. If we tell anything new, we are laughed at as fabulous and romantic.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762, British society figure, letter writer)
The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.
Max Lerner (1902-1992, American author, columnist)
Does this boat go to Europe, France?
Anita Loos (1893-1981, American novelist, screenwriter)
Spirit of place! It is for this we travel, to surprise its subtlety; and where it is a strong and dominant angel, that place, seen once, abides entire in the memory with all its own accidents, its habits, its breath, its name.
Alice Meynell (1847-1922, British poet, essayist)
If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.
Henry Miller (1891-1980, American author)
A man should ever be ready booted to take his journey.
Michel Eyquem De Montaigne (1533-1592, French philosopher, essayist)
Traveling is not just seeing the new; it is also leaving behind. Not just opening doors; also closing them behind you, never to return. But the place you have left forever is always there for you to see whenever you shut your eyes.
Jan Myrdal
Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.
Regina Nadelson
Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.
Jonathan Raban (1942-, British author, critic)
As for pictures and museums, that don't trouble me. The worst of going abroad is that you've always got to look at things of that sort. To have to do it at home would be beyond a joke.
Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897, British novelist, historian)
If my ship sails from sight, it doesn't mean my journey ends, it simply means the river bends.
John Enoch Powell (1912-1998, British statesman)
He who has not traveled widely thinks that his mother is the best cook.
African Proverb (Sayings of African origin)
In the middle ages people were tourists because of their religion, whereas now they are tourists because tourism is their religion.
Robert Runcie
Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore. We do not in the least want to hear what he has seen in Hong Kong.
Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962, British novelist, poet)
Its really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs.
J. D. Salinger (1919-, American author)
Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950, Irish-born British dramatist)
Using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. They have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures.
Susan Sontag (1933-, American essayist)
Journeys end in lovers meeting.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616, British poet, playwright, actor)
An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys.
Iain Sinclair (1943-, British author)
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968, American author)
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968, American author)
When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable.
John Steinbeck (1902-1968, American author)
He travels best that knows when to return. Middleton 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 (1850-1895, Scottish essayist, poet, novelist)
It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1895, Scottish essayist, poet, novelist)
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1895, Scottish essayist, poet, novelist)
Travel is ninety percent anticipation and ten percent recollection.
Edward Streeter
A solitary traveler can sleep from state to state, from day to night, from day to day, in the long womb of its controlled interior. It is the cradle that never stops rocking after the lullaby is over. It is the biggest sleeping tablet in the world, and no one need ever swallow the pill, for it swallows them.
Lisa St. Aubin De Teran (1953-, British author)
Travelling 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 (1953-, British author)
I have been a stranger in a strange land.
The Holy Bible (Sacred scriptures of Christians and Judaism)
Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind.
Paul Theroux (1941-, American novelist, travel writer)
Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
Paul Theroux (1941-, American novelist, travel writer)
Inter-railers are the ambulatory equivalent of Macdonald's, walking testimony to the erosion of French culture.
Alice Thompson
He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, American essayist, poet, naturalist)
Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862, American essayist, poet, naturalist)
Man is flying too fast for a world that is round. Soon he will catch up with himself in a great rear end collision.
James Thurber (1894-1961, American humorist, illustrator)
You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.
Mark Twain (1835-1910, American humorist, writer)
Every year it takes less time to fly across the Atlantic and more time to drive to the office.
Author Unknown
If it's tourist season, why can't we kill them?
Author Unknown
Old men and far travelers may lie with authority.
Author Unknown
The alternative to a vacation is to stay home and tip every third person you see.
Author Unknown
The bigger the summer vacation the harder the fall.
Author Unknown
Those that say you can't take it with you never saw a car packed for a vacation trip.
Author Unknown
I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train.
Oscar Wilde (1856-1900, British author, wit)
I was disappointed in Niagara -- most people must be disappointed in Niagara. Every American bride is taken there, and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.
Oscar Wilde (1856-1900, British author, wit)
I think that wherever your journey takes you, there are new gods waiting there, with divine patience -- and laughter.
Susan M. Watkins
O public road, I say back I am not afraid to leave you, yet I love you, you express me better than I can express myself.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892, American poet)
I traveled among unknown men, in lands beyond the sea; nor England! did I know till then what love I bore to thee.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850, British poet)
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