301 Quotations Found

Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel.

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Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning?

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Travel is a boomerang. It drops you right where you started.

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Travel prevents us from feeling the presence of those we have traveled such great distances to be near.

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The tourist is a deferential character. He outsources the vindication of his experiences to the ethnologist, to postcards, to conventional wisdom about what you are or are not supposed to do in a place. This deference, this “openness to experience,” is exactly what renders the tourist incapable of experience.

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When you travel, you suspend your usual standards for what counts as a valuable use of time. You suspend other standards as well, unwilling to be constrained by your taste in food, art, or recreational activities.

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The peculiar rationality of tourists allows them to be moved both by a desire to do what they are supposed to do in a place and a desire to avoid precisely what they are supposed to do.

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If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting.

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“A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change.” This definition is taken from the opening of “Hosts and Guests,” the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets changed? Here is a telling observation … [ Read more ]

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Travel gets branded as an achievement: see interesting places, have interesting experiences, become interesting people. Is that what it really is? Pessoa, Emerson, and Chesterton believed that travel, far from putting us in touch with humanity, divorced us from it. Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best. Call this the traveler’s delusion.

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Although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them.

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“Tourism” is what we call traveling when other people are doing it.

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The person you are matters more than the place to which you go; for that reason we should not make the mind a bondsman to any one place. Live in this belief: “I am not born for any one corner of the universe; this whole world is my country.”

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The idea of traveling nauseates me… Ah, let those who don’t exist travel! […] Travel is for those who cannot feel… Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to move around to feel.

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Wherever you go becomes a part of you somehow.

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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.

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When one eye is fixed upon your destination, there is only one eye left with which to find the way.

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I think I have no “place” home. Home is people and where you work well. I have homes everywhere and many I have not even seen yet. This is perhaps why I am restless. I haven’t seen all of my homes.

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No matter how far we travel, the memories will follow in the baggage car.

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It isn’t how much time you spend somewhere that makes it memorable: it’s how you spend the time.

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