Third World Traveler Quotes & Sayings

It is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book. Any distinguished traveler who comes to our shores is likely to get more dinners and speeches of welcome than he can well dispose of, but the best books, if noticed at all, meet with coldness and suspicion, or, what is worse, gratuitous, off-hand criticism. — Henry David Thoreau

You don't take a traveler for a partner if you hope that the world will always stay the same. You do it because you can't quite break away, yourself, but you can't live without the promise of change hanging over you every day.

That's what the border means, for a lot of people. The promise of change they'd never be able to make any other way. — Greg Egan

Writing is traveling through uncharted territory - your mind. You are the first traveler, and your essays are the world's first maps. — Harry Bauld

I hope I leave this world gracefully, like a pilgrim slips from the back of his donkey at the end of a long ride, like a traveler disembarks from an airplane that has carried him across a great ocean. — Kim Wright

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

There's something profoundly intense and intoxicating about friendship found en route. It's the bond that arises from being thrust into uncomfortable circumstances, and the vulnerability of trusting others to navigate those situations. It's the exhilaration of meeting someone when we are our most alive selves, breathing new air, high on life-altering moments. It's the discovery of the commonality of the world's people and the attendant rejection of prejudices. It's the humbling experience of being suspicious of a stranger who then extends a great kindness. It's the astonishment of learning from those we set out to teach. It's the intimacy of sharing small spaces, the recognition of a kindred spirit across the globe.
It's the travel relationship, and it can only call itself family. — Lavinia Spalding

Every sacred book, successively, has been accepted in the faith that it was to be the final resting-place of the sojourning soul;but after all, it was but a caravansary which supplied refreshment to the traveler, and directed him farther on his way to Isphahan or Bagdat. Thank God, no Hindoo tyranny prevailed at the framing of the world, but we are freemen of the universe, and not sentenced to any caste. — Henry David Thoreau

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

Nobody tells young writers it's okay if you're not very good, you'll get better. So I just thought I'm not very good, so I should try to do every other thing besides writing. That's how I ended up being a hitchhiker, a world traveler, and a mathematician. — Bonnie Jo Campbell

Think of thyself as a stranger and traveler on the earth, to whom none of the many affairs of this world belong and who has no permanent township on the globe. — Claire Clairmont

Once I had thought chiefly of the man of letters, the traveler, the poet, the lover; none of that had faded, to be sure, but now for the first time I could see among all those figures, standing out with great clarity of line, the most official and yet the most hidden form of all, that of the emperor. The fact of having lived in a world which is toppling around us had taught me the importance of the Prince. — Marguerite Yourcenar

An in experienced traveler would imagine that their land contains the finest buildings, the biggest towns, the richest, best-fed, happiest people in the world. — Iain Pears

When a man is a Traveler, the world is his house & the sky is his roof, where he hangs his hat is his home, & all the people are his family — Drew Bundini Brown

The dream I had was on a certain night. And in the dream the traveler appeared. What night was this? In the life of the traveler when was it that he came to spend the night in that rocky posada? He slept and events took place which I will tell you of, but when was this? You can see the problem. Let us say that the events which took place were a dream of this man whose own reality remains conjectural. How assess the world of that conjectural mind? And what with him is sleep and what is waking? How comes he to own the a world at night at all? Things need a ground to stand upon. As every soul requires a body. A dream within a dream makes other claims than what a man might suppose. — Cormac McCarthy

What loomed was a flayed man with his brisket tacked open like a cooling beef and his skull peeled, blue and bulbous and palely luminescent, black grots his eyeholes and bloody mouth gaped tongueless. The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrate another figure paled, for his surgeons move about the world even as you and I. — Cormac McCarthy

By allowing the group of people whom we call "our loved ones" to continually expand, we realize that this group is actually limitless. It is only narrow-mindedness and a superficial convention that makes us divide people into friends and strangers. The world-traveler soon learns to see in every person he interacts with a potential friend . — Nicos Hadjicostis

Everywhere you travel to, be fully there. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Sometimes just being on a beach with my loved ones is all the adventure I need. I am a happy camper and continue to be a citizen of the world. I have yet to discover other cultures, other peoples' dreams and treasures. I will always be a traveler who is discovering beautiful Gaia. — Guy Laliberte

Neil Shepard's (T)RAVEL/ UN(T)RAVEL takes us from the sublime
Paris in Spring, sunset on Corfu
to an unscheduled toilet stop in a Chinese desert as fellow passengers cheer. Yes, there's light at the heart of this book; but darkness too, as the world and the traveler unravel and re-ravel, fall together, come apart. Shepard proves the best sort of traveling companion
lively, observant, incisive, eloquent, charmed by the strange and familiar, the old and new. Climb aboard these poems. Enjoy the ride. — Charles Harper Webb

a man travels back in time and murders his grandfather, thus preventing his own birth, the universe simply carries on with the grandfather dead, the time traveler forever unborn, and it does so without a care in the world as to how that murder was possible in the first place. No one will ever be aware that history has changed, and no one will ever be aware that he was supposed to have offspring, and grand-offspring. No one, that is, except the time traveler. That person, who should now never have existed, continues to exist anyway. And again, the universe just shrugs it off, insisting - and rightly so - that it owes no one any explanation for its conduct. — Edward Aubry

I can't imagine a life without thinking, doing art. I don't feel any need to be a world traveler or an adventurer. I'm very happy doing what I'm doing. I think somehow I know that I should have a larger vision of art, but I can't think of what that would be. — John Baldessari

A traveler of taste will notice that the wise are polite all over the world, but the fool only at home. — Oliver Goldsmith

To a traveler paying his first visit, [San Francisco] has the interest of a new planet. It ignores the meteorological laws which govern the rest of the world. — Fitz Hugh Ludlow

Even during the period when Rome lost much of her ancient prestige, an Indian traveler observed that trade all over the world was operated with the aid of Roman gold coins which were accepted and admired everywhere. — Paul Einzig

I say this because as an older man I am prone to ponder matters in the light of death in a way that you are not. I am like a traveler from Mars who looks down in astonishment at what passes here. And what I see is the same human frailty passed from generation to generation. What I see is again and again the same sad human frailty. We hate one another; we are the victims of irrational fears. And there is nothing in the stream of human history to suggest we are going to change this. But
I digress, confess that. I merely wish to point out that in the face of such a world you have only yourselves to rely on. You have only the decision you must make, each of you, alone. And will you contribute to the indifferent forces that ceaselessly conspire toward injustice? Or will you stand up against this endless tide and in the face of it be truly human? — David Guterson

One of the most connective things we can do for ourselves, is to become world travelers of our own internal landscapes. What i love about creating art, is the excitement of turning that landscape inside out for all to see. And the kind of courage that takes, when i don't know what the outcome will be ... — Jaeda DeWalt

Please be a traveler, not a tourist. Try new things, meet new people, and look beyond what's right in front of you. Those are the keys to understanding this amazing world we live in. — Andrew Zimmern

And once you saw the world from three, or five, different roads, the view was never the same. The map changed and altered, and its details became more accurate. The landmarks receded or grew, depending on the angle from which you observed them, and at once, there might be an escarpment from which the astonished traveler would rendezvous with her selves and could suddenly comprehend the land as it truly was. — Kate Elliott

Being a world traveler, I'm touched and moved by everything that happens, especially to children. It gets me emotionally sick and I go through a lot of pain when I see that type of pain. I can't pretend as if I don't see it. It affects me very much. — Michael Jackson

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his Breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-Besotted Traveler; he
Served human liberty. — Jonathan Swift