Travel Tourist Quotes & Sayings

When I travel, I feel more like a nomad than a tourist. — Mohsin Hamid

Don't be a tourist. Plan less. Go slowly. I traveled in the most inefficient way possible and it took me exactly where I wanted to go. — Andrew Evans

When we told our guide that we didn't want to go to all the tourist places he took us instead to the places where they take tourists who say that they don't want to go to tourist places. These places are, of course, full of tourists. — Douglas Adams

Every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

I'm passionate and I travel the world not just as a tourist but to understand cultures ... I've lived with Masai tribe ... I travel the world and bring it back in the form of a research book that would become the starting point for the collection. — John Galliano

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes 'sight-seeing.' — Daniel J. Boorstin

Thom pulled nervously at his 'Kings' t-shirt. The Kings are a brutal West African gang that he follows onscreen. Such 'tourist shows', as I understand they are called, have become wildly popular in recent years, as global unrest makes actual travel less popular.

Armoured imaging teams, using tiny remote drone cameras known as 'flies', take the viewer inside the violent, gang-controlled regions of Nigeria and Cameroon. Using a touch screen, viewers (or 'zoners' as they are sometimes called) can follow the action from multiple angles while cheering on their favourite gang. — Paul Christensen

The reading of tourist prospectuses is one of the joys of the world
it is like operetta in prose
all so flowery and heavenlike. — Marsden Hartley

In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms. — John Banville

Meanwhile it's got stormy, the tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path. Three people are sitting in a glassy tourist cafe between clouds and clouds, protected by glass from all sides. Since I don't see any waiters, it crosses my mind that corpses have been sitting there for weeks, statuesque. All this time the cafe has been unattended, for sure. Just how long have they been sitting here, petrified like this? — Werner Herzog

Short-term travel has quadrupled: in 1980, the number of international tourist arrivals accounted for just 3.5 percent of the world's population, compared to almost 14 percent in 2010.16 Every year, an estimated 320 million people fly to attend professional meetings, conventions, and international gatherings - and their numbers are steadily growing.17 — Moises Naim

Move to a new country and you quickly see that visiting a place as a tourist, and actually moving there for good, are two very different things. — Tahir Shah

You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom. — Mark Twain

From a tourist's point of view, you finally have time to travel, but you need to spend your time looking after your child. Club Med takes care of the entire family. — Guo Guangchang

Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home. — Paul Bowles

We did all the tourist crap, but I just wanted to sit in a cafe and watch people — Sara Shepard

The artificial preservation of local identities is essential to tourism. In other words, the tourist represents both the attempt to transcend all borders and identities and the simultaneous attempt to fix the identities of non-Western subjects within its gaze. — William T. Cavanaugh

A tourist is a fellow who drives thousands of miles so he can be photographed standing in front of his car. — Emile Genest

An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just paused cannot stand you. — Jamaica Kincaid

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

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

A traveller moves among real people in their own milieu and learns from them, soaking up their wisdom and philosophy, their way of being in the world. A tourist simply hops from one tourist highpoint to another, skimming across the surface, cramming in quantity rather than quality, and comes away with his soul and imagination unchanged, untouched by the wonder of a life lived differently. — Roxanne Reid

You avoid the overcrowding of tourist locations by traveling in off-season. That is now one of the major rules of smart travel - go when the tourists are NOT there, and even though you may have to don an extra layer of clothing, you will enjoy the sights and the experiences at the destination in the way that they were enjoyed before they became so well-known. — Arthur Frommer

I'm perpetual tourist, and that's the best way to travel. Nobody gets used to you, you make new friends without having to hear anyone's everyday problems, and you jet back still feeling like a know-it-all. — John Waters

The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all. — Daniel J. Boorstin

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

Separate vacations have become more popular among married couples. We don't think this is a good idea. Over time, doing your own thing will cause you to lead separate lives. We are not talking about a three-day trip to Florida with your sister or best friend - if you want to take small trips like this, feel free to. But if you want to take a major vacation - say, to spend two weeks in Europe - your husband should be your travel companion. But suppose your idea of a fun vacation is going to Europe or lying on the beach in the Caribbean, while your husband loves tours of historic sites and museums. Our advice is to figure out a way to do a little of both. One year, you can go to the beach, the next year you can do a tourist package together, or go on a trip with a beach near some sites of cultural interest. Once you start planning separate vacations, you become like roommates, not lovers. — Ellen Fein

If time travel were possible we'd be inundated with tourist from the future. — Stephen Hawking

Many travelers are essentially fantasists. Tourists are timid fantasists, the others - risk takers - are bold fantasists. The tourists at Etosha conjure up a fantastic Africa after their nightly dinner by walking to the fence at the hotel-managed waterhole to stare at the rhinos and lions and eland coming to drink: a glimpse of wild nature with overhead floodlights. They have been bused to the hotel to see it, and it is very beautiful, but it is no effort....My only boast in travel is my effort... — Paul Theroux

My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection. — Ryszard Kapuscinski

The best tourist is one without a camera — Kamand Kojouri

The tourist was the great conservative who hated novelty and adored dirt. — Henry Adams

Anyone who needs more than one suitcase is a tourist, not a traveler — Ira Levin

Life is a journey so everyone is a tourist — Friedrich Nietzsche

What I'm getting at is like the distinction between tourist and a traveler. The tourist experience is superficial and glancing. The traveler develops a deeper connection with her surroundings. She is more invested in them
the traveler stays longer, makes her own plans, chooses her own destination, and usually travels alone: solo travel and solo participation, although the most difficult emotionally, seem the most likely to produce a good story. — Ted Conover

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

To the tourist, travel is a means to an end; to the traveler, it's an end in itself. — Marty Rubin

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

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see. — G.K. Chesterton

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

Each member of this shadowy network resented the others, who were irritating reminders that nothing was more American, whatever that means, than fleeing the American, whatever that is, and that their soft version of self-imposed exile was just another of late empire's packaged tours. — Ben Lerner

But nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller. I don't have the slightest wish to be intrepid. I don't want to prove myself to myself or anyone else. I don't care if no one thinks me brave or hardy. I have no concern at all that I did not have whatever it is I should have had to take a dive out of a plane or off a building. None of that matters to me in the least. — Jenny Diski

The sheeplike nature of travel - being on a beach with thousands of other people is not my idea of fun. I also don't like being a tourist because you don't know what's really going on in a country. — Diana Quick

It is not every tourist who bubbles over with mirth, and that unquenchable spirit of humor which turns a trial into a blessing. — Agnes Repplier

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance. — Henry Adams

For Delta blueman Robert Johnson and his contemporaries, the train was the eternal metaphor for the travelling life, and it still holds true today. There is no travel like it. Train lines carve through all facets of a nation. While buses stick to major highways and planes reduce the unfolding of lives to a bird's eye view, trains putter through the domains of the rich and the poor, the desperate and the idle, rural and urban, isolated and cluttered. Through train windows you see realities rarely visible in the landscaped tourist areas. Those frames hold the untended jungle of a nation's truth. Despite my shredded emotions, there was still no feeling like dragging all your worldly possessions onto a carriage, alone and anonymous, to set off into the unknown; where any and all varieties of adventures await, where you might meet a new best friend, where the love of your life could be hiding in a dingy cafe. The clatter of the tracks is the sound of liberation. — Patrick O'Neil

Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives- from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango - with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists' stage. — Daniel J. Boorstin

Slow travel now rivals the fly-to-Barcelona-for-lunch culture. Advocates savour the journey, travelling by train or boat or bicycle, or even on foot, rather than crammed into an airplane. They take time to plug into the local culture instead of racing through a list of tourist traps. — Carl Honore

India offers exciting business opportunities owing to the growth in corporate travel and a significant middle-class population waiting to explore the world. To begin with, Travelex is setting up eight city centre branches in metros and other major cities including tourist destinations. — Lloyd Dorfman