Quotes & Sayings About Culture And Travel

The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone. — David Rakoff

There is a difference between arrival and entrance. Arrival is physical and happens all at once. The train pulls in, the plan touches down, you get out of the taxi with all your luggage. You can arrive a place and never really enter it; you get there, look around, take a few pictures, make a few notes, send postcards home. When you travel like this, you think you know where you are, but, in fact, you have never left home. Entering takes longer. You cross over, slowly, in bits and pieces. [ ... ] It is like awakening slowly, over a period of weeks. And then one morning, you open your eyes and you are finally here, really and truly here. You are just beginning to know where you are. — Jamie Zeppa

We have everywhere an absence of memory. Architects sometimes talk of building with context and continuity in mind, religious leaders call it tradition, social workers say it's a sense of community, but it is memory we have banished from our cities. We have speed and power, but no place. Travel, but no destination. Convenience, but no ease. — Howard Mansfield

I am a passionate traveler, and from the time I was a child, travel formed me as much as my formal education. In order to appreciate cultures of another nation, one needs to go there, know the people and mingle with the culture of that country. One way to do that, if one is lucky enough, is to buy things from those cultures. — David Rockefeller

I love the simplicity, the ingredients, the culture, the history and the seasonality of Italian cuisine. In Italy people do not travel. They cook the way grandma did, using fresh ingredients and what is available in season. — Anne Burrell

Globalization by the way of McDonald's and KFC has captured the hearts, the minds, and from what I can see through the window, the growing bellies of the folks here. — Raquel Cepeda

And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems. — Donna George Storey

The world-traveler must, on the one hand, be ready (and actually seek) to visit a tribe in the Solomon Islands or stay with Tibetan nomads; on the other hand, he has to be prepared, when it is required, to wear his suit to attend a classical music concert in a big metropolis. Just as an important part of exploring Brazil is to visit its shantytowns, it is an indispensable part of understanding the French culture to eat at a gourmet restaurant in Paris. — Nicos Hadjicostis

Looking for a good book to read and a great teacher to listen to? Here is a good book and here is a great teacher: Other cultures! To read this book and to listen to this teacher, all you need is to travel! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The idea behind it did come out of my love for travel shows. I loved them as a little kid and I loved Anthony Bourdain, but I really did want to see one about LGBTQ communities and culture and the specific country that we visit. Of course it is about the joys and the triumphs and the nightlife, but sadly, unfortunately, it's also about the discrimination that people face, because that's the reality. — Ellen Page

Japan is the most intoxicating place for me. In Kyoto, there's an inn called the Tawaraya which is quite extraordinary. The Japanese culture fascinates me: the food, the dress, the manners and the traditions. It's the travel experience that has moved me the most. — Roman Coppola

I love how the landscape gives the impression of vast space and intimacy at the same time: the thin brown line of a path wandering up an immense green mountainside, a plush hanging valley tucked between two steep hillsides, a village of three houses surrounded by dark forest, paddy fields flowing around an outcrop of rock, a white temple gleaming on a shadowy ridge. The human habitations nestle into the landscape; nothing is cut or cleared beyond what is requires. Nothing is bigger than necessary. Every sign of human settlement repeat the mantra of contentment: This is just enough. — Jamie Zeppa

Women have routinely been punished and intimidated for attempting that most simple of freedoms, taking a walk, because their walking and indeed their very beings have been construed as inevitably, continually sexual in those societies concerned with controlling women's sexuality. — Rebecca Solnit

English has so many words that do not exist in Sharchhop, but they are mostly nouns, mostly things: machine, airplane, wristwatch. Sharchhop, on the other hand, reveals a culture of material economy but abundant, intricate familial ties and social relations. People cannot afford to make a distinction between need and desire, but they have separate words for older brother, younger sister, father's brother's sons, mother's sister's daughters. And there are 2 sets of words: a common set for everyday use and an honorific one to show respect. There are three words for gift: a gift given to a person higher in rank, a gift to someone lower, and a gift between equals. — Jamie Zeppa

But I'm not running away. I'm running toward... toward adventure, toward discovery, toward diversity. And while I was in Mexico I discovered something intruiging: Once I leave the U.S., I am not bound by the rules of my culture. And when I am a foreigner in another country, I am exempt from the local rules. This extraordinary situation means that there are no rules in my life. I am free to live by the standards and ideals and rules I create for myself. — Rita Golden Gelman

I allude to Back to the Future in the 1985 story to let folks know it was an inspiration and because it literally was the most time-travelly bit of pop culture we had in the mid 80's. I can talk about their tools for considering change. First, the book is metafictive in a traditional sense where I'm showing and telling the reader that the act of writing and reading is a reflexive way to push boundaries of real and literal time travel. Writers and readers are time travellers. The question is what we do with that time we traveled when we leave a book, leave a page. — Kiese Laymon

Travel early and travel often. Live abroad, if you can. Understand cultures other than your own. As your understanding of other cultures increases, your understanding of yourself and your own culture will increase exponentially. — Tom Freston

When I go to Bali, when I come to India and travel and see different cultures. I make sure I'm involved in the world out there, creatively, culturally. — Donna Karan

Kiss Across Time," she read. Well, that fit with the lyrics and Domhnall words. Domhnall lived through years of threat from enemies., the invasion of his country and the loss of his culture. His stories and epic poems were all full of death, glory, love, battles, dying and more... or would be, if she had ever been able to catch more than a glimpse of him from the corner of her eye, in research terms. — Teal Ceagh

Travel enables us to enrich our lives with new experiences, to enjoy and to be educated, to learn respect for foreign cultures, to establish friendships, and above all to contribute to international cooperation and peace throughout the world. — Jules Verne

I've always loved Louisiana and particularly New Orleans, and I think a lot of people when they travel there, think they're home there - there are just so many spirits, it's so rich in culture. It's steeped in a true spirit of individuality that makes this country. It's the oldest part of our story, in a way. And being in that climate, it was really conducive to letting our imaginations soar. I found it to be the true inspiration. — Scarlett Johansson

There are still many places I haven't seen that I'd like to travel to. I've never seen the Pyramids, and I'd love to explore the culture in North India. I think walking in the Andes would also be awesome. — Bjorn Ulvaeus

We're Americans. I don't consider us to be evil, I just don't think we know any better. We're a really young culture. We're hillbillies, and the rest of the world sees us that way. I travel all over the world, and probably the only worse rednecks than us are the Australians. And they're an even younger country. — Steve Earle

I was so done with looking at life through the eyes of beer-drinking cheese-heads. I wanted to go on that mission trip and look through the eyes of someone from a different culture and see what they saw. I wanted to meet people who didn't crush the can of what they just drank on their forehead.-Rebecca Meyer, Crooked Lines — Holly Michael

Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities below us, the first mechanical men are being constructed that will have the capability to pilot the ship on its maiden voyage. But no one has asked if this dream we've had for so long will lose its value once it's realized. What will happen when those mechanical men step out of their ship and onto the surface of this moon, which has served humanity for thousands of years as our principal icon of love and madness? When they touch their hands to the ground and perform their relentless analyses and find no measurable miracles, but a dead gray world of rocks and dust? When they discover that it was the strength of millions of boyhood daydreams that kept the moon aloft, and that without them that murdered world will fall, spiraling slowly down and crashing into the open sea? — Dexter Palmer

Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry. — Mark Twain

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 differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You're going to get a sense of what globalization looks like. It's not what Tom Friedman writes about; I'm sorry. You're going to see that global climate change is very real. And that for some people, their day consists of walking 12 miles for four buckets of water. And so there are lessons that you can't get out of a book that are waiting for you at the other end of that flight. A lot of people - Americans and Europeans - come back and go, ohhhhh. And the light bulb goes on. — Henry Rollins

The fear of rape puts many women in their place - indoors, intimidated, dependent yet again on material barriers and protectors... I was advised to stay indoors at night, to wear baggy clothes, to cover or cut my hair, to try to look like a man, to move someplace more expensive, to take taxis, to buy a car, to move in groups, to get a man to escort me - all modern versions of Greek walls and Assyrian veils, all asserting it was my responsibility to control my own and men's behavior rather than society's to ensure my freedom. I realized that many women had been so successfully socialized to know their place that they had chosen more conservative, gregarious lives without realizing why. The very desire to walk alone had been extinguished in them - but it had not in me. — Rebecca Solnit

It opens the mind toward an understanding of human
nature and destiny. It increases wisdom. It is the very
essence of that much misinterpreted concept, a liberal
education. It is the foremost approach to humanism,
the lore of the specifically human concerns that distinguish
man from other living beings ... Personal culture
is more than mere familiarity with the present
state of science, technology, and civic affairs. It is
more than acquaintance with books and paintings and
the experience of travel and of visits to museums. It is
the assimilation of the ideas that roused mankind from
the inert routine of a merely animal existence to a life
of reasoning and speculating. It is the individual's
effort to humanize himself by partaking in the tradition
of all the best that earlier generations have
bequeathed. — Ludwig Von Mises

If you want to know the reality of life, then you should travel. At first travel your country, after that start travelling the world. Travel to know your surroundings so that we can say that you are an aware person. Nature, people and culture are calling you, so travel. — Imran Khan

When it was proposed to me to go abroad, rub oft some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, I fear lest my life will lose some of its homeliness. If these fields and streams and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and inspire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss. — Henry David Thoreau

One very good way to invite stares of disapproval in Japan is to walk and eat at the same time. — Andrew Horvat

[Traveling] makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe. You would think the millions of people who come to Williamsburg every year would say to each other, "Gosh, Bobbi, this place is beautiful. Let's go home to Smellville and plant lots of trees and preserve all the fine old buildings." But in fact that never occurs to them. They just go back and build more parking lots and Pizza Huts. — Bill Bryson

But there are spirits of a yet more liberal culture, to whom no simplicity is barren. There are not only stately pines, but fragile flowers, like the orchises, commonly described as too delicate for cultivation, which derive their nutriment from the crudest mass of peat. These remind us, that, not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger's path and the Indian's trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness. — Henry David Thoreau

Culture becomes visible when we travel between " cultures " and when we look back in time to other " cultures " than our own. — Michael Ryan

What better way to get to know a culture than to go there and learn their sports? And I say to people who tell me they can't travel, 'How much did you spend at the mall this year? How many times did you eat out? Take that money and go.' — Dhani Jones

To travel best requires some time preparing for your visit to a particular location - that you don't travel anywhere without spending a few nights reading about the culture and history of the place you are visiting. This is what most of us don't do - we fling ourselves on an exotic destination hoping that someone will tell us what we are looking at, but by that time it's too late, and all the lectures and tour guides simply add to our confusion. — Arthur Frommer

The sacrifices of time and money that Chinese friends will make for one another often go far beyond what is expected or accepted in Western society. — Larry Herzberg

Some journeys in life can only be traveled alone. — Ken Poirot

Japan, not only a mega-busy city that thrives on electronics and efficiency, actually has an almost sacred appreciation of nature. One must travel outside of Tokyo to truly experience the 'old Japan' and more importantly feel these aspects of Japanese culture. — Apolo Ohno

Humboldt's early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: '1) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants, minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5)
The acquaintance with new species of the human race
their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.'
What may be accomplished in a lifetime
and seldom or never is. — Alain De Botton

In the Latina/o culture, blessing is a big deal. Growing up, I was brought up to see the blessings that surrounded me and my family. As a child, after I'd said my prayers, my mom would send me to bed with a blessing for a good night's rest. Whenever I would leave my abuelita's (grandmother's) house, she would tell me, "Dios te bendiga, mijito" ("God bless you, my little one"). In my family and in many Latina/o households, the women are the vessels of God's blessing, and thus bestowers and distributors of this blessing to their families. To this day, even though I am grown and have two children of my own, whenever I travel somewhere distant or am undertaking a major project, my mother will sit me down, lay hands on me, and say a prayer of blessing. — Francisco J. Garcia Jr.

World travel and getting to know clergy of all denominations has helped mold me into an ecumenical being. We're separated by theology and, in some instances, culture and race, but all that means nothing to me any more. — Billy Graham

This for me was home, and for the visitors, Kashmir". — Irfan Nabi

I had long ago learned that when you are the giant, alien visitor to a remote and foreign culture it is sort of your job to become an object of ridicule. It's the least you can do, really, as a polite guest. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Public concern for the environment cannot be addressed by placing the blame on growth without spelling out the causes of growth. Nor can an explanation be exhausted by citing "consumerism" while ignoring the sinister role played by rival producers in shaping public taste and guiding public purchasing power. Aside from the costs involved, most people quite rightly do not want to "live simply." They do not want to diminish their freedom to travel or their access to culture, or to scale down needs that often serve to enrich human personality and sensitivity. — Murray Bookchin

I really like to travel when I write. Something about seeing new things and being in new cultures and environments provokes new thoughts in your head. — Josh Radnor

We are all of us, to some degree or another, brainwashed by the society we live in. We are able to see this when we travel to another country, and are able to catch a glimpse of our own country with foreign eyes.. the best we can hope for is that a kindly friend from another culture will enable us to look at our culture with dispassionate eyes. — Doris Lessing

Travel plucks us out of the worn routines of our lives and plops us down into a new culture, language, or city, and lets us figure life out. It strips the excess away and melts us down to our core. It teaches us that stuff doesn't make us happy - only experiences and being present do that. — Fred Perrotta

You travel to lush looted countries. parts of earth laying on their sides. barely breathing. hot with rust, infection, and tourist anemia. you and your camera arrive. start tearing at bodies with your lust. it's harmless. appreciating culture. sharing. honoring clothing. the way certain skin exists. — Nayyirah Waheed

I love travel. There's nothing more beneficial than getting to travel, to see different cultures, to see different environments and expose your children to that. — Teri Hatcher

Space travel leading to skylife is vital to human survival, because the question is not whether we will be hit by an asteroid, but when. A planetary culture that does not develop spacefaring is courting suicide. All our history, all our social progress and growing insight will be for nothing if we perish. No risk of this kind, however small it might be argued to be, is worth taking, and no cost to prevent it is too great. No level of risk is acceptable when it comes to all or nothing survival. — Gregory Benford

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

It is hardly unusual for a young man to be drawn to a pursuit considered reckless by his elders; engaging in risky behavior is a rite of passage in our culture no less than in most others. Danger has always held a certain allure. That, in large part, is why so many teenagers drive too fast and drink too much and take too many drugs, why it has always been so easy for nations to recruit young men to go to war. It can be argued that youthful derring-do is in fact evolutionarily adaptive, a behavior encoded in our genes. McCandless, in his fashion, merely took risk-taking to its logical extreme. — Jon Krakauer

It must be noted however, that there were other Europeans that travelled to other parts of the earth, but because they did not take with them the same Protestant culture of dignity of labour, they did not record the same level of success, growth and development as the early Protestant immigrants had done. — Sunday Adelaja

How can we ever understand what we are and where we belong in the universe if we haven't experienced anything outside of our own nation, culture, or history? — Bruce Poon Tip

You only have to travel to Europe to see the difference that an entitlement culture makes. While the United States is a vibrant, creative, and exciting place, Europe today is largely stagnant. Workers there have little incentive to move ahead, because the rate of taxation is punishing and the governments guarantee a certain standard of living. — Bill O'Reilly

Gift giving is part of the culture no matter where you are and no matter how long you stay. — Christalyn Brannen

Planets in the ninth house often indicate world travel. At the least, a person with ninth-house placements will have friends from different lands and may delight in international foods and culture. — Anonymous

You may be told that the legal decisions lead the changes, that judges and lawmakers lead the culture in those theaters called courtrooms, but they only ratify change. They are almost never where change begins, only where it ends up, for most changes travel from the edges to the center. — Rebecca Solnit

The Professor noted two nymphs with strawberries on their heads, a DayGlo Amish lady, a mustachioed man in a rainbow apron. He wrote Saturday Night Fever, then crossed it out and wrote Drag Ball + Bollywood and underlined it twice. — La Carmina

My father was born and raised in Havana, Cuba. His family is from Spain. My father never taught me how to speak Spanish when I was little. That's very disappointing to me. I'm still planning on learning it on my own. I really want to travel to Spain and immerse myself in the culture and learn it on my own. — Kether Donohue

I don't want to rescind American directors but I think that European directors in general, because of the size of the nations in Europe are exposed to all different cultures, they can easily travel from one distinct culture to another in a matter of hours - you can drive for two weeks across the United States and you're in the same basic culture - so there is a certain breadth of understanding and sophistication that they bring to it and frankly, in some cases they are less expensive than American directors. — Wes Craven

Traveling is all about talking to new people. That's the ball game. That's the whole point, travel to an exotic place, meet the people, immerse in their culture, and find out why they're so fucked up. If you're not going to spill your guts to complete strangers, why take the trip? You might as well just stay home abusing sex toys until that mishap that brings paramedics and you become the talk of the neighborhood. But communication is easy for me because I'm a listener. I love to hear people gab about themselves. Every single person is special. Everyone has great stories. Like you. I'll bet you have a million. How old are you? Sixty? — Tim Dorsey