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

The moon makes a traveler hunger for something bitter in the world, what is it? I will vanish; others will come here, what is that? An old question. — Anne Carson

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

One of the things I'm fascinated by as a traveler is watching how different countries control how they let the world encounter them. — Hanya Yanagihara

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

The traveler used to go about the world to encounter the natives. A function of travel agencies now is to prevent this encounter. — Daniel J. Boorstin

I am acutely aware that I am now the middle-aged traveler that I used to consider to lame, so embarrassing. And I have something to say to my 20-year-old self:

You cannot possibly know how much time it takes to learn to treasure this world, how many years it takes to properly cherish your place in it.

As you age, you will find it more and more remarkable, a miracle really, that any of us -- you, me -- are here at all, the result of an undeserved, infinite gift.

And the older you get, the more you know how much you will miss all this when you are gone.

In the end, the world was not all that changed by your coming, you were not all that crucial to it. But the world, this world, which you will one day travel in homage and gratitude, this world was everything to you. — Vivian Swift

Excerpted From Chapter 18
The most famous sign in the world was only a few hundred yards above me, and the sight of it stopped me in my tracks. The light bulbs surrounding the letters must have been controlled by a timer of some kind because they were off now. But what shocked me was the scale. I was used to seeing the sign from a distance. From this perspective there was no sense of the word HOLLYWOODLAND. All I saw were gigantic letters looming dimly above me in the moonlight like ancient monoliths erected in tribute to the gods of some long-extinct tribe.
A primal feeling of foreboding prickled the hairs on the back of my neck. I could imagine the traveler of an earlier age coming across Stonehenge in the dark and experiencing a similar sensation. — H.P. Oliver

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

The hotel was once where things coalesced, where you could meet both townspeople and travelers. Not so in a motel. No matter how you build it, the motel remains the haunt of the quick and dirty, where the only locals are Chamber of Commerce boys every fourth Thursday. Who ever heard the returning traveler exclaim over one of the great motels of the world he stayed in? Motels can be big, but never grand. — William Least Heat-Moon

The world can doubtless never be well known by theory: practice is absolutely necessary; but surely it is of great use to a young man, before he sets out for that country, full of mazes, windings, and turnings, to have at least a general map of it, made by some experienced traveler. — Lord Chesterfield

What a pity that the Earth, in spite of modern transport, still remains unknown to most. We are all extraterrestrials on Earth! Soon after we set out to explore the world, we realize that we have been living on an unknown planet all along. Paradoxically, the moment one becomes a world-traveler, he simultaneously becomes an extraterrestrial exploring an alien planet. — Nicos Hadjicostis

As you get past the first few weeks of your travel experience however, you'll discover that partying on the road is different from partying at home. At home, partying is a way of celebrating the weekend or taking a pause from the workaday world. On the road, every moment is a weekend, every day a break from the workaday world. Thus, falling into a nightly ritual of partying - as can easily happen in traveler hangouts anywhere on the planet - is a sure way to overlook the subtlety of places, stunt your creativity, and trap yourself in the patterns of home. Granted, you can have plenty of fun in the process; but if you travel the world merely to indulge in the same kinds of diversions you enjoy at home, you'll end up selling your experience short. — Rolf Potts

It is part of the photographer's job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country. — Bill Brandt

He who has attained the freedom of reason to any extent cannot, for a long time, regard himself otherwise than as a wanderer on the face of the earth - and not even as a traveler towards a final goal, for there is no such thing. But he certainly wants to observe and keep his eyes open to whatever actually happens in the world; therefore he cannot attach his heart too firmly to anything individual; he must have in himself something wandering that takes pleasure in change and transitoriness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A traveler enters the world into which he travels, but a tourist brings his own world with him and never sees the one he's in. — Thomas H. Cook

The overdressed traveler betrays more interest in being seen than in seeing, while the true traveler knows that the novel world about her serves as the most appropriate accessory. — Gregory Maguire

The service we render to others is really the rent we pay for our room on this earth. It is obvious that man is himself a traveler; that the purpose of this world is not 'to have and to hold' but "to give and serve." — Wilfred Grenfell

So the restless traveler long at last for his native soil, finds his cottage in the arms of his wife, in the affection of his children, labor necessary for their support, all the happiness which he sought in vain the wild world — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world — Ralph Waldo Emerson

His action of joining them, which would have been rude in a restaurant that was not moving at three hundred kilometers an hour, was perfectly acceptable on a train, which mimicked the entirely random joinings of life but revealed their true nature by making them last only hours or days, rather than years and decades. People on a train form an alliance, as if the world that surrounded the parallel rails were hostile and and they refugees from it. The dining car, humming and rocking gently in the night, annihilated past and future and made all associations outside of itself seem vaguely unreal. So they welcomed him at their table, for he was one of them, a traveler, not one of those wraiths through whose night-lit cities they passed. — Alexander Jablokov

The Christian is the most contented man in the world, but he is the least contented with the world. He is like a traveler in an inn, perfectly satisfied with the inn and its accommodation, considering it as an inn, but putting quite out of all consideration the idea of making it his home. — Charles Spurgeon

There is a river whose waters give
immortality; somewhere there must be
another river whose waters take it away. The
number of rivers is not infinite; an immortal
traveler wandering the world will someday have
drunk from them all. — Jorge Luis Borges

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be engaged to marry some one with whom you are not in love is an inevitable step in a world where the existence of passion is only a traveler's story brought from the heart of deep forests and told so rarely that wise people doubt whether the story can be true. — Virginia Woolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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