Journeys Travel Quotes & Sayings

For me, exploration was a personal venture. I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. At heart I knew that to write or even to talk of my travels was to tarnish the achievement. I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples. I set myself a goal on these journeys, and, although the goal itself was unimportant, its attainment had to be worth every effort and sacrifice ... No, it is not the goal but the way there that matters, and the harder the way the more worth while the journey. — Wilfred Thesiger

Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

All journeys eventually end in the same place, home. — Chris Geiger

For years, I meant to read 'Arabian Sands', Wilfred Thesiger's account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia's Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing. — Michael Dirda

When you travel, you experience, in a very practical way, the act of rebirth. You confront completely new situations, the day passes more slowly, and on most journeys you don't even understand the language the people speak. — Paulo Coelho

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one's life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open. — George Eliot

But: all journeys were return journeys. The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a man in a bed surrounded by empty bottles. The man who says, "I've got a wife and kids" is far from home; at home he speaks of Japan. But he does not know - how could he? - that the scenes changing in the train window from Victoria Station to Tokyo Central are nothing compared to the change in himself; and travel writing, which cannot but be droll at the outset, moves from journalism to fiction, arriving promptly as the Kodama Echo at autobiography. From there any further travel makes a beeline to confession, the embarrassed monologue in a deserted bazaar. The anonymous hotel room in a strange city ... — Paul Theroux

People have to make journeys, what we want is people to have alternatives in public transport so that they can make a choice about the sort of way in which they're going to travel. — Theresa May

Life lessons are not journeys traveled in straight lines but are crossroads
formed years and miles apart. — Gina Greenlee

Maps are essential. Planning a journey without a map is like building a house without drawings. — Mark Jenkins

The passion for travelling is, I believe, instinctive in some natures. We have seen men persevere in their enterprises against the most formidable obstacles; and, without means or friends, and even ignorant of the languages of the various countries through which they passed, pursue their perilous journeys into remote places, until, like the knight in the Arabian tale, they succeeded in snatching a memorial from every shrine they visited. — James Holman

Rest and repose are as much a part of life's journeys as seeing all we came to see. — Gina Greenlee

The treasured vistas of our solo journeys are not always about the landscape. — Gina Greenlee

The idea and experience of travel can mean many things: it involves movement of some kind, sometimes through unknown places, at other times just between home and the world. Journeys can also be inward, marking rites of passage or a growth into a new dimension. We travel in search of profit, pleasure or curiosity, to labour and survive, to flee from tyranny or sorrow, and into real and imagined utopias. — Teju Behan

But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?"
"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world
oh, woe is me!
and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!
... I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before me! — Charles Dickens

As it often did when I thought about chicken wings and entropy, my mind turned to Emerson. "Life is a journey, not a destination." Now that was one stone-cold motherfucker who was not afraid to deliver the truth: After the torments of the journey, you have been well-prepared for the agonies of the destination. — Colson Whitehead

What do you know about me, given that I believe in secrecy? ... If I stick where I am, if I don't travel around, like anyone else I make my inner journeys that I can only measure by my emotions, and express very obliquely and circuitously in what I write ... Arguments from one's own privileged experience are bad and reactionary arguments. — Gilles Deleuze

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

Sluggish and sedentary peoples, such as the Ancient Egyptians
with their concept of an afterlife journey through the Field of Reeds
project on to the next world the journeys they failed to make in this one. — Bruce Chatwin

The solution is so obvious, but for so many of us we would travel a hundred miles out of the way to avoid it, gather a thousand opinions on the way and take a pit stop in fear to check our map before we proceed through hell. Heaven was always a direct flight with no layovers. — Shannon L. Alder

Whatever the benefits of prolific and convenient air travel, we may curse it for its smooth subversion of our attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives. — Alain De Botton

The destination is not the journey. The destination is the person you choose to enjoy the journey with. — Shannon L. Alder

The older I got the more I appreciated the role of travel as a stimulus to memories, and the way in which journeys even to new places were somehow always awakening memories of places seen in an ever-receding past. — Michael Jacobs

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

I suppose that every wanderer started in a garden somewhere. So few of us are born into motion. — Candas Jane Dorsey

All reading matter, fiction or nonfiction, inspirational or factual - no matter where the stage is set whether the books were printed a hundred or more years ago or only yesterday, whether or not we like what we read - is a journey for the mind. We find ourselves in strange countries and walk in them with strange people, for a time. Often we do not like what we see and hear and encounter; often we do not comprehend it. It's like arriving someplace at night, and then in the morning looking out of the windows, not understanding what we see.
However, whether we travel with pleasure or repulsion, comprehension or bewilderment, these journeys expand the mind and enlarge our grasp of the world that once was or that which is now, or even that which may sometime be. — Faith Baldwin

Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. The perfection of traveling is to travel without baggage. — Henry David Thoreau

Life is a daring adventure.I am enjoying every bit of the joyful journey. — Lailah Gifty Akita

White sharks and tuna travel for thousands of miles before returning to the same hot spot just as salmon do when they return to the same stream. These journeys are the marine equivalent of wildebeest migrations that take place on the Serengeti plain in Africa. — Barbara Block

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BEING TAKEN

When you begin to surrender, forget yourself. Become senseless with no motive, so you can be blown from east to west and back without knowing anything, or caring either. It would not be surprising if in such mindlessness your essential being went hundreds of miles without you being aware of it.

We see such wandering in the clouds and the waters. The forests and the crops too in their ways travel with caravans of people along the earth. God takes our souls on journeys he knows nothing of. Why? We don't know, being as we are the passed-out reveler laid in a wagon and driven elsewhere. What we love, what we want, is this being held in the presence, this being taken. That is the satisfaction, not learning why or how or where we are, or when we'll arrive somewhere else. — Bahauddin

As the President has indicated, my life has been a life of travel - for 60 years constantly moving over the wide world on journeys which first and last have taken me to 83 countries, and, what is more significant, to most of them again and again. — John Raleigh Mott

I love to travel inside my head, take journeys toward the unknown, meet new people, dream. — Alber Elbaz

He didn't like to fly
the noise and vibration gave him a headache
but, as with anything new, he was excited by the strangeness of it. The disjuncture intrigued him: stepping through a door in one place, sitting still for a few hours, then stepping out a thousand miles away. It seemed to him a very American mode of travel, even more so than the car, not simply going farther faster, but eliminating any temporal experience of the journey, skipping over whole sections of the country, the sole focus on arriving, with the help of expensive and arcane technologies, at one's destination, except of course, when one didn't
a thought brought on by his own instinctive disbelief and the bumpiness of the flight. — Stewart O'Nan

He who has never left his hearth and has confined his researches to the narrow field of the history of his own country cannot be compared to the courageous traveller who has worn out his life in journeys of exploration to distant parts and each day has faced danger in order to persevere in excavating the mines of learning and in snatching precious fragments of the past from oblivion. — Mas'udi

The journey of the mind always has longer to travel than the heart because dreams carry weight, while love makes you float. — Shannon L. Alder

Long journeys are strange things: if we were always to continue in the same mind we are in at the end of a journey, we should never stir from the place we were then in: but Providence in kindness to us causes us to forget it. It is much the same with lying-in women. Heaven permits this forgetfulness that the world may be peopled, and that folks may take journeys to Provence. — Marie De Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise De Sevigne

Traveling is so complicated. There are so many people everywhere. I make my best journeys on my couch. — Coco Chanel

When you focus on the journey, you will be blessed with guardian angels to direct your path. — Lailah Gifty Akita

The best journeys are the ones that answer questions that at the outset you never even thought to ask.
-Rick Ridgeway — Susan Magsamen