136 Inspiring Travel Quotes

Planning your next adventure or simply yearning for a touch of wanderlust from the comfort of your home? Travel quotes have a unique way of capturing the essence of adventure, providing inspiration, and awakening the explorer in each of us. In this post, we bring you a carefully curated collection of the top 136 inspiring travel quotes, thoughtfully selected to ignite your spirit and motivate your journeys. Whether you're seeking motivation for the road ahead or just a sprinkle of escapism for your daily routine, these quotes are sure to resonate with your traveler's heart. Let these words of wisdom from seasoned travelers, literary greats, and adventurous souls guide you on your next voyage, wherever it may lead.

1. “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.” - Anna Quindlen

2. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” - Lao Tzu

3. “What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? - it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” - Jack Kerouac

4. “It was as if we'd only been gone the weekend. Or had we been gone a lifetime. Part of that was because when you've lived in Alaska, living in other places seems easier, less challenging, less threatening. Alaska had enlarged each of us. No one is ever the same after coming back from Alaska.” - Peter Jenkins

5. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” - Lao Tzu

6. “Voy a hacer un rompeolascon mi alegria pequena. No quiero que sepa el mar que por mi pecho van penas.” - Julia de Burgos

7. “I thought that I must always search for the remarkable combinations, add unknowns, mix things that were clearly marked with things beyond marking. I would leave the simulated test and enter into forbidden territory. I would look for that moment when I would begin to pour alone and in wonder. I would always try to seize that moment and to accept its challenge. I wanted to become the seeker, the aroused and passionate explorer, and it was better to go at it knowing nothing at all, always choosing the unmarked bottle, always choosing your own unproven method, armed with nothing faith and a belief in astonishment. And if by accident, I could make a volcano in a single test tube, then what could I do with all the strange magnificent elements of the world with its infinity of unknowns, with the swarm of man, with civilization, with language?” - Pat Conroy

8. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

9. “How can the mind take hold of such a country? Generations of invaders have tried, but they remain in exile. The important towns they build are only retreats, their quarrels the malaise of men who cannot find their way home. India knows of their trouble. She knows of the whole world's trouble, to its uttermost depth. She calls "Come" through her hundred mouths, through objects ridiculous and august. But come to what? She has never defined. She is not a promise, only an appeal.” - E.M. Forster

10. “Warum bedauern wir Leute, die nicht reisen können? Weil sie sich, indem sie sich äußerlich nicht ausbreiten können, auch innerlich nicht auszudehnen vermögen, sie können sich nicht vervielfältigen, und so ist ihnen die Möglichkeit genommen, weitläufige Ausflüge in sich selbst zu unternehmen und zu entdecken, wer und was anderes sie auch hätten werden können.” - Pascal Mercier

11. “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.” - Anais Nin

12. “Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” - Terry Pratchett

13. “Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.” - Alan Bennett

14. “I am not the same having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” - Mary Anne Radmacher

15. “to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

16. “I read; I travel; I become” - Derek Walcott

17. “...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.” - David Mitchell

18. “Men read maps better than women because only men can understand the concept of an inch equaling a hundred miles.” - Roseanne Barr

19. “You ever want to negotiate a hostage situation in Quebec, I'm your man. Send me in for a little parley and the francophone miscreants will flee, hands over bleeding ears.” - Will Ferguson

20. “The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.” - Carl Sagan

21. “It’s funny. When you leave your home and wander really far, you always think, ‘I want to go home.’ But then you come home, and of course it’s not the same. You can’t live with it, you can’t live away from it. And it seems like from then on there’s always this yearning for some place that doesn’t exist. I felt that. Still do. I’m never completely at home anywhere.” - Danzy Senna

22. “There's a part of me that thinks perhaps we go on existing in a place even after we've left it.” - colum mccann

23. “David Attenborough has said that Bali is the most beautiful place in the world, but he must have been there longer than we were, and seen different bits, because most of what we saw in the couple of days we were there sorting out our travel arrangements was awful. It was just the tourist area, i.e., that part of Bali which has been made almost exactly the same as everywhere else in the world for the sake of people who have come all this way to see Bali.” - Douglas Adams

24. “The impulse to travel is one of the hopeful symptoms of life. ” - Agnes Repplier

25. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation. ” - Elizabeth Drew

26. “The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.” - Rolf Potts

27. “I'm with you in Rocklandin my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.” - Allen Ginsberg

28. “Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight. It stirs my world of the past like a summons to resurrection; the graves unclose, the dead are raised; thoughts, feelings, memories that slept, are seen by me ascending from the clods--haloed most of them--but while I gaze on their vapoury forms, and strive to ascertain definitely their outline, the sound which wakened them dies, and they sink, each and all, like a light wreath of mist, absorbed in the mould, recalled to urns, resealed in monuments.” - Charlotte Brontë

29. “In the boundaryless forests, there’re dancers of nude.Yet in the confines of pasture, there’s promise of food.On which is your side?Ô, but tarry and bide,ere you decide,in both do confide.” - Roman Payne

30. “See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.” - Ray Bradbury

31. “I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.” - John Steinbeck

32. “Streets flooded. Please advise.” - Robert Benchley

33. “will I ever get over the pull I feel to both of these places?” - Sara Ferguson

34. “We would oppose the turning of the planet and refuse the setting of the sun.” - Dave Eggers

35. “I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” - Herman Melville

36. “Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.” - Diane Johnson

37. “Quite possibly there's nothing as fine as a big freight train starting across country in early summer, Hardesty thought. That's when you learn that the tragedy of plants is that they have roots.” - Mark Helprin

38. “There are many hostelries in his report, which is the true account of an expedition.” - Claudio Magris

39. “...but I preferred reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing.” - Jack Kerouac

40. “My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. A camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.” - Maira Kalman

41. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” - Freya Stark

42. “Gradually the magic of the island [Corfu] settled over us as gently and clingingly as pollen.” - Gerald Durrell

43. “It is a pity indeed to travel and not get this essential sense of landscape values. You do not need a sixth sense for it. It is there if you just close your eyes and breathe softly through your nose; you will hear the whispered message, for all landscapes ask the same question in the same whisper. 'I am watching you -- are you watching yourself in me?' Most travelers hurry too much...the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not to much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. It is to be had for the feeling...you can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as still as a needle, you'll be there.” - Lawrence Durrell

44. “I'm heading for a clean-named placelike Wisconsin, and mad as a jack-o'-lantern, will get therewithout help and nosy proclivities.” - John Ashbery

45. “You can leave Hong Kong, but it will never leave you.” - Nury Vittachi

46. “Oh! That was poetry!" said Pippin. "Do you really mean to start before the break of day?” - J.R.R. Tolkien

47. “The journey is the destination.” - Dan Eldon

48. “My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet—that’s not a problem. The problem is that I just can’t live anywhere on the planet.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

49. “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels.” - Mark Twain

50. “Cities were always like people, showing their varying personalities to the traveler. Depending on the city and on the traveler, there might begin a mutual love, or dislike, friendship, or enmity. Where one city will rise a certain individual to glory, it will destroy another who is not suited to its personality. Only through travel can we know where we belong or not, where we are loved and where we are rejected.” - Roman Payne

51. “All good people agree, And all good people say,All nice people, like Us, are We And every one else is They:But if you cross over the sea, Instead of over the way,You may end by (think of it!) looking on We As only a sort of They!” - Rudyard Kipling

52. “Dad reckons if you have a great time in one place, then that's a good reason for never going back. Nothing will ever measure up to the first time. He laughs at people who go to the same place every year, same beach, same house, same things to do.” - James Moloney

53. “Ritzonia" was the epithet coined by Bernard Bernson, who sold Italian pictures to American millionaires, to describe the unreal, mortifying sameness of their luxury. "Ritzonia," he wrote in 1909, "carries its inmates like a wishing carpet from place to place, the same people, the same meals, the same music. Within its walls you might be at Peking or Prague or Paris or London and you would never know where.” - Richard Davenport-Hines

54. “The trip from Portland to New York City was like climbing Mount Everest without oxygen. It went on and on, and by the time you reached your destination, there was no sensation left in your extremities.” - Kristin Hannah

55. “He has a passport," my classmates would whisper. "Quick, let's run before he judges us!” - David Sedaris

56. “The world isn't built with a ramp.” - Walt Balenovich

57. “You can't control the past, but you can control where you go next.” - Kirsten Hubbard

58. “To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,To gain all while you give,To roam the roads of lands remote,To travel is to live.” - Hans Christian Andersen

59. “If you write about a place, you need to be right about the place!” - Laurence Bradbury

60. “So far I had been travelling alone with my handbook and my Western Railway timetable: I was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere: sight-seeing was a way of passing the time, but, as I had concluded in Istanbul, it was an activity very largely based on imaginative invention, like rehearsing your own play in stage sets from which all the actors had fled.” - Paul Theroux

61. “Ultimately, I found my instincts mirrored in a line from Thoreau: 'My needle...always settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to me, and the earth seems more exhausted and richer on that side.” - Phillip Connors

62. “Roam abroad in the world, and take thy fill of its enjoyments before the day shall come when thou must quit it for good.” - saadi

63. “the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature” - Graham Greene

64. “Always stay sharp on railways and cruise ships for transit has a way of making everything clear.” - Anna Godbersen

65. “...a tourist can't help but have a distorted opinion of a place: he meets unrepresentative people, has unrepresentative experiences, and runs around imposing upon the place the fantastic mental pictures he had in his head when he got there.” - Michael Lewis

66. “It's hard to walk away from a winning streak, even harder to leave the table when you're on a losing one.” - Cara Bertoia

67. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” - Samuel Johnson

68. “Where does one go in a tremendous city like Calcutta to find insider information? I recalled India's golden rule: do the opposite of what would be normal anywhere else.” - Tahir Shah

69. “A journey of observation must leave as much as possible to chance. Random movement is the best plan for maximum observation” - Tahir Shah

70. “Lured by the wilderness, and by the chance of spotting rare desert elephants, a few intrepid tourists make their way to the Skeleton Coast each year. It's just about as remote as any tourist destination on earth, but one that pays fabulous dividends.” - Tahir Shah

71. “Where you come from does matter -- but not nearly as much as where you are headed.” - Jodi Picoult

72. “As a travel writer I've specialized in gritty, fearful destinations, the kind of places that make a reader's hair stick on end.” - Tahir Shah

73. “It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream - till you got a bite.A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in the future. Then came an adjournment to the bedchamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other - a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching - a hairy tarantula on stilts - why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a whole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime, it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals.” - Mark Twain

74. “Why do you need that thing?" September asked. "None of the airports back home have them.""They do. You just can't see them right," Betsy Basilstalk said with a grin. "All customs agents have them, otherwise, why would people agree to stand in line and be peered at and inspected? We all live inside the terrible engine of authority, and it grinds and shrieks and burns so that no one will say, lines on maps are silly. Where you live, the awful machinery is smaller, harder to see. Less honest, that's all. Whereas Rupert here? He's as honest as they come. Does what it says on the box.” - Catherynne M. Valente

75. “I heard wordOf bellied sailcloth,Creak of oars,And gold in Eastland.Then I smelledA smell remembered:Salt of sprayAnd black-pitched boat's keel.” - Frans G. Bengtsson

76. “Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.” - Evelyn Waugh

77. “A wise man travels to discover himself.” - James Russell Lowell

78. “As anyone who's ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed.” - Tahir Shah

79. “I have found a dream of beauty at which one might look all one's life and sigh.” - Isabella Bird

80. “Travel empties out everything you’ve into the box called your life, all the things you accumulate to tell you who you are” - Claire Fontaine

81. “Something about the circus stirs their souls, and they ache for it when it is absent.” - Erin Morgenstern

82. “In some peculiar way, indeed, the rules were now beginning to seem quite logical. It was then I knew that I had been in India long enough.” - Tahir Shah

83. “By the time I had finished my coffee and returned to the streets, the rain had temporarily abated, but the streets were full of vast puddles where the drains where unable to cope with the volume of water. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you would think that if one nation ought by now to have mastered the science of drainage, Britain would be it.” - Bill Bryson

84. “Suddenly I came out of my thoughts to notice everything around me again-the catkins on the willows, the lapping of the water, the leafy patterns of the shadows across the path. And then myself, walking with the alignment that only comes after miles, the loose diagonal rhythm of arms swinging in synchronization with legs in a body that felt long and stretched out, almost as sinuous as a snake…when you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.” - Rebecca Solnit

85. “Italy and London are the only places where I don't feel to exist on sufferance.” - E.M. Forster

86. “Kamu juga selalu ngomong, you will never never know if you never never try. Kita nggak boleh menilai buku dari luarnya aja, kan?” - Winna Efendi

87. “There is no happiness for him who does not travel, Rohita!Thus we have heard. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner… therefore, wander!… The fortune of him who is sitting, sits; it rises when he rises; it sleeps when he sleeps; it moves when he moves. Therefore, wander!” - Aitareya Brahmanan in the Rigveda

88. “Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.” - Anthony Doerr

89. “The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt.” - Henry Adams

90. “Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.” - Ma Jian

91. “أدركت بعد ساعات من التسكع في هذا الشارع أني لا أتفرج على ألمانيا.. وإنما أتفرج على نفسي.. على الصورة التي في ذهن الألمان عني وعن السواح من كل الألوان.” - مصطفى محمود

92. “A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.” - Alain De Botton

93. “The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.” - Alain De Botton

94. “...Don't insult readers by questioning the extent of their imaginations. Most need only to be nudged to solve a good mystery.” - Peggy Kopman-Owens

95. “There are people in this world so rich that when it rains they simply fly away on private jets in search of sun.” - Peggy Kopman-Owens

96. “How could I ever forget my best friend, the man, who had changed my destiny simply by allowing me to write about him?” - Peggy Kopman-Owens

97. “[O]n general principles it is best that I should not leave the country. Scotland Yard feels lonely without me, and it causes an unhealthy excitement among the criminal classes.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

98. “All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport -- in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign policy."[Quoted in Socialism and Foreign Policy and War and the Liberal Conscience]” - George Bernard Shaw

99. “Travel far enough, you meet yourself.” - David Mitchell

100. “It’s an irritating reality that many places and events defy description. Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu, for instance, seem to demand silence, like a love affair you can never talk about. For a while after,you fumble for words, trying vainly to assemble a private narrative, an explanation, a comfortable way to frame where you’ve been and whats happened. In the end, you’re just happy you were there- with your eyes open- and lived to see it.” - Anthony Bourdain

101. “It seemed like all the way to tomorrow and over it to the days beyond.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

102. “Every place is a goldmine. You have only to give yourself time, sit in a teahouse watching the passers-by, stand in a corner of the market, go for a haircut. You pick up a thread – a word, a meeting, a friend of a friend of someone you have just met – and soon the most insipid, most insignificant place becomes a mirror of the world, a window on life, a theatre of humanity.” - Tiziano Terzani

103. “I nearer than I was yesterday and further than I am today, tomorrow I'll be square one.” - Racquel McDonnell

104. “I suppose there has been nothing like the airports since the age of the stage-stops - nothing quite as lonely, as sombre-silent. The red-brick depots were built right into the towns they marked - people didn't get off at those isolated stations unless they lived there. But airports lead you way back in history like oases, like the stops on the great trade routes. The sight of air travellers strolling in ones and twos into midnight airports will draw a small crowd any night up or two. The young people look at the planes, the older ones look at the passengers with a watchful incredulity.” - F. Scott Fitzgerald

105. “You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home.” - Terry Pratchett

106. “No one ever seems to wonder what happens if it turns out we hate living on a planet? What if the sky’s too big? What if the air stinks? What if we go hungry?’‘And what if the air tastes of honey? What if there’s so much food we all get too fat? What if the sky is so beautiful we don’t get any work done because we’re all looking at it too much?” - Patrick Ness

107. “C'è sempre qualcosa di più, un po' più in là... non finisce mai.” - Jack Kerouac

108. “The urge to travel feels magnetic. Two of my favorite words are linked: departure time. And travel whets the emotions, turns upside down the memory bank, and the golden coins scatter.” - Frances Mayes

109. “India – a land where the last thing one needs to bother with is looking good. In India – at least in the circles I moved in – it's natural to look beautiful by the smile in your heart and the way you move through the world.” - Erin Reese

110. “India will reveal to you the places in your heart that must be purified.” - Erin Reese

111. “[...] I will go to France, to Yugoslavia, to China and continue my profession.''As sanitary engineer?''No, Monsieur. As adventurer. I will see all the peoples and all the countries in the world.” - Bruce Chatwin

112. “I've met the most interesting people while flying or on a boat. These methods of travel seem to attract the kind of people I want to be with.” - Hedy Lamarr

113. “Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'Worries Forget your worries All the stations full of cracks tilted along the way The telegraph wires they hang from The grimacing poles that gesticulate and strangle themThe world stretches lengthens and folds in like an accordion tormented by a sadistic handIn the cracks of the sky the locomotives in anger FleeAnd in the holes,The whirling wheels the mouths the voicesAnd the dogs of misfortune that bark at our heelsThe demons are unleashedIron railsEverything is off-key The broun-roun-roun of the wheelsShocksBouncesWe are a storm under a deaf man's skull...'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?'Hell yes, you're getting on my nerves you know very well we're far away Overheated madness bellows in the locomotivePlague, cholera rise up like burning embers on our wayWe disappear in the war sucked into a tunnel Hunger, the whore, clings to the stampeding cloudsAnd drops battle dung in piles of stinking corpsesDo like her, do your job'Tell me, Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre?” - Blaise Cendrars

114. “One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.” - Edith Wharton

115. “A traveler's most interesting meals tend to happen by surprise.” - David Dale

116. “[As a very young man, I thought] of Europe as a place that could not exist except in the imagination, in glorious dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.” - Roman Payne

117. “A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.” - Alain De Botton

118. “Oh, I can picture myself rattling along Route 66 on that thing, headphones on, singing along to ZZ Top's 'Sharp Dressed Man' or the opening line from 'Born to be Wild' by Steppenwolf - 'Get your motor running...' The trike brings out that in all of us, which is no bad thing. Forget Viagra, get yourself a trike!” - Billy Connolly

119. “I ordered a coffee and a little something to eat and savored the warmth and dryness. Somewhere in the background Nat King Cole sang a perky tune. I watched the rain beat down on the road outside and told myself that one day this would be twenty years ago.” - Bill Bryson

120. “What he was after hangs between the visible and the invisible, between the here and now and the seemingly elsewhere.” - Andre Aciman

121. “I wore only black socks, because I had heard that white ones were the classic sign of the American tourist. Black ones though,- those'll fool 'em. I supposed I hoped the European locals' conversation would go something like this:PIERRE: Ha! Look at that tourist with his camera and guidebook!JACQUES: Wait, but observe his socks! They are...black!PIERRE: Zut alors! You are correct! He is one of us! What a fool I am! Let us go speak to him in English and invite him to lunch!” - Doug Mack

122. “Gift giving is part of the culture no matter where you are and no matter how long you stay.” - Christalyn Brannen

123. “I would go to parties and say I was an editor, and people, especially women – and that was important to me back then – would say, “Oh, really?” and raise their eyebrows and look at me a little more carefully. I remember the first party I went to after I became a teacher, someone asked me what I did for a living, and I said, “Well, I teach high school.” He looked over my shoulder, nodded his head, said, “I went to high school,” and walked away.Once I repeated this anecdote around a big table full of Mexican food in the garden at a place called La Choza in Chicago, and Becky Mueller, another teacher at the school, said that I was a “storyteller.” I liked that. I was looking for something to be other than “just” a teacher, and “storyteller” felt about right. I am a teacher and a storyteller in that order. I have made my living and my real contribution to my community as a teacher, and I have been very lucky to have found that calling, but all through the years I have entertained myself and occasionally other people by telling stories.” - Peter Ferry

124. “As is often the case when I travel, my vulnerability -- like not knowing what the hell I'm going to do upon arrival -- makes me more open to outside interactions than I might be when I'm at home and think I know best what needs to be done. On the road, serendipity is given space to enter my life.” - Andrew McCarthy

125. “The most amazing travellers were to humble to write about it” - Guido Colombo

126. “They hadn't much faith in travel, nor a great belief in a change of scene as a panacea for spiritual ills; they were simply glad to be going.” - Zelda Fitzgerald

127. “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

128. “What an absurdity to go and bury oneself in South America, where they are always having revolutions.” - Agatha Christie

129. “If you travel everywhere and find the same elements everywhere, somehow it reduces the value of the place (Curiosity, Tokyo, Japan)” - Editorial Board of Approaching Hotel Designers

130. “To travel beyond our world is to change this present one forever.” - Steven J. Carroll

131. “When you are walking down the road in Bali and your pass a stranger, the very first question he or she will ask you is, "Where are you going?" The second question is, "Where are you coming from?" To a Westerner, this can seem like a rather invasive inquiry from a perfect stranger, but they're just trying to get an orientation on you, trying to insert you into the grid for the purposes of security and comfort. If you tell them that you don't know where you're going, or that you're just wandering about randomly, you might instigate a bit of distress in the heart of your new Balinese friend. It's far better to pick some kind of specific direction -- anywhere -- just so everybody feels better.The third question a Balinese will almost certainly ask you is, "Are you married?" Again, it's a positioning and orienting inquiry. It's necessary for them to know this, to make sure that you are completely in order in your life. They really want you to say yes. it's such a relief to them when you say yes. If you're single, it's better not to say so directly. And I really recommend that you not mention your divorce at all, if you happen to have had one. It just makes the Balinese so worried. The only thing your solitude proves to them is your perilous dislocation from the grid. If you are a single woman traveling through Bali and somebody asks you, "Are you married?" the best possible answer is: "Not yet." This is a polite way of saying, "No," while indicating your optimistic intentions to get that taken care of just as soon as you can.Even if you are eighty years old, or a lesbian, or a strident feminist, or a nun, or an eighty-year-old strident feminist lesbian nun who has never been married and never intends to get married, the politest possible answer is still: "Not yet.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

132. “Adventure can be an end in itself. Self-discovery is the secret ingredient...” - Grace Lichtenstein

133. “There are several other sources of enjoyment in a long voyage, which are of a more reasonable nature. The map of the world ceases to be a blank; it becomes a picture full of the most varied and animated figures. Each part assumes its proper dimensions: continents are not looked at in the light of islands, or islands considered as mere specks, which are, in truth, larger than many kingdoms of Europe. Africa, or North and South America, are well-sounding names, and easily pronounced; but it is not until having sailed for weeks along small portions of their shores, that one is thoroughly convinced what vast spaces on our immense world these names imply.” - Charles Darwin

134. “I've always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don't sleep - some don't - but they live there. Everybody else is just a tourist. Venice, Italy, for instance, pulls in a millions tourists for their own Carnival season but the actual local population is only a couple of hundred thousand. Lots of empty canals and streets at night, especially when you get away from the big hotels, and the residents pretty much have it to themselves when tourist season slows during the winter. Jude has character - everybody agrees on that. It also has that thing I like best about a city: You can never own it, but it you treat it with respect it will eventually invite you in and make you one of its true citizens. But like I said, you've got to live there. If you're never around after the bars close, or at the other end of the night as the early workers get up to start another day and the coffee shops and news agents raise their security gates, then you don't really know the place, do you?” - Tad Williams

135. “The ancient paused for a moment, as if his strength were failing. Yet I sensed that there was more to tell. Looking deep into my eyes, he whispered: 'The Gond kingdoms have fallen, their people live dispersed in poverty: the teak trees and the jungles have been cleared... but the importance of the Gonds must not be forgotten!” - Tahir Shah

136. “The very fact that a Frenchman was prepared, after tow minutes of conversation, to be so friendly towards anyone, especially one who had come from England, made me restless.” - Tahir Shah