There is something comforting about a pithy quote, especially when it comes to travel. A good quote can clang like a rich bell: it makes you sit up and take notice in a way you never had before.
I have collected quotes for years in my various notebooks, scrawling them down in an armchair or on a bus as it rumbles through a foreign desert. So much of travel, at least for me, is spent alone, and reading is a way of always having an intelligent companion by my side.
Here are 50 quotes that have kept me company in far-flung corners of the world.
1. "Being lost in Australia gives you a lovely sense of security." – Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
2. "We do not follow maps to buried treasure and X never, ever marks the spot." – Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark
3. "Even from the simplest, the most realistic point of view, the countries which we long for occupy, at any given moment, a far larger place in our actual life than the country in which we happen to be." – Marcel Proust, Swann's Way
4. "When you're travelling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road." – William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
5 "Is he not sacred, even to the gods, the wandering man who comes in weariness?" – Homer, The Iliad
6. "No one has ever described the place where I have just arrived: this is the emotion that makes me want to travel. It is one of the greatest reasons to go anywhere." – Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules
7. "I'm leaving on a jet plane; Don't know when I'll be back again." – John Denver, Leaving on a Jet Plane
8. "And that is all anyone can do, try to be honest about what he feels, what he's seen or thinks he's seen." – Paul Theroux, Sunrise With Seamonsters
9. "Paris is always a good idea." – Sabrina (Audrey Hepburn) in Sabrina
10. "Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can." – Ian Frazier, Travels in Siberia
11. "I came to realise that I travelled best when I travelled no faster than a dog could trot." – Gardner McKay, Journey Without a Map
12. "People come back from flights and tell you a story like it's a horror story. They act like their flight was like a cattle car in the 1940s in Germany. That's how bad they make it sound. They're like, 'It was the worst day of my life. We didn't board for 20 minutes and they made us sit there on the runway for 40 minutes.' Oh really? What happened next? Did you fly in the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight you non-contributing zero?" – Louis C.K. (comedian)
13. "Plane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo." – Al Gore
14. "Tourism is a mortal sin." – Werner Herzog
15. "I knew instinctively that it was the very hardness of life in the desert which drew me back there — it was the same pull which takes men back to the polar ice, to high mountains, and to the sea." – Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands
16. "The Australians, it seems to me, thrive on their remoteness from the world and see it as a way of keeping up a code of "No worries, mate," while peddling their oddities to visitors: nonconformity is at once a fact of life for many, and a selling point." – Pico Iyer, Falling Off the Map
17. "Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel that it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country." – Karen Blixen, Out of Africa
18. "The greatest justification for travel is not self-improvement but rather performing a vanishing act, disappearing without a trace." – Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari
19. "A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless." – John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
20. "You can't deny what you've learned; you can't deny your travels; you can't deny the nature of your life." – V. S. Naipaul, The Paris Review, Fall 1998
21. "There are no foreign lands. It is the traveller only who is foreign." – Robert Louis Stevenson
22. "Culture shock is often felt sharply at the borders between countries, but sometimes it doesn't hit fully until you've been in a place for a long time." – Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind's Eye
23. "Darwin quotes the example of Audubon's goose, which, deprived of its pinion feathers, started out to walk the journey on foot. He then goes on the describe the sufferings of a bird, penned up at the season of its migration, which would flail its wings and bloody its breast against the bars of its cage." – Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines
24. "But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind." – Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air
25. "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train." – Oscar Wilde
26. "It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent." – Dave Barry (comedian)
27. "Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life." – Jack Kerouac, On the Road
28. "In America there are two classes of travel – first class, and with children." – Robert Benchley (actor)
29. "Is there any point in going across the world to eat something or buy something or watch people squatting among their ruins? Travel is a state of mind. It has nothing to do with distance or the exotic. It is almost entirely an inner experience." – Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend
30. "O public road, you express me better than I can express myself." – Walt Whitman
31. "Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories." – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
32. "Not all those who wander are lost." – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of The Rings
33. "Done laid around, done stayed around; This old town too long; And it seems like I've got to travel on." – Bob Dylan, Gotta Travel On
34. "The city bursts with ideas as with traffic, a swirl of newness and surprise. Who can be bored in a city? If you are tired of one activity you can try something else, change your job, take your custom to another restaurant." – Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere
35. "He who does not travel does not know the value of men." – Moorish proverb
36. "Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death." – Blaise Pascal, Pensees
37. "Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by." – Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken and Other Poems
38. "It might be said that a great unstated reason for travel is to find places that exemplify where one has been happiest. Looking for idealised versions of home—indeed, looking for the perfect memory." – Paul Theroux, Fresh Air Fiend
39. "There's no place like home." – Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz
40. "It's an old sailor's idea that every ship has a rope with one end made fast to her bows and the other held by the loved ones at home." – Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
41. "I ... had what Kierkegaard called 'the sickness of infinitude,' wandering from one path to another with no real recognition that I was embarked upon a search, and scarcely a clue as to what I might be after. I only knew that at the bottom of each breath there was a hollow place that needed to be filled." – Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
42. "They are travelling cheaply, with that touch of indolence and occasional luxury that comes only from having real resources. They live in Levis and sunlight. Sometimes they brush their teeth in streams." – James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime
43. "The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." – St Augustine of Hippo
44. "One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." – Henry Miller
45. "Be out of sync with your times for just one day, and you will see how much eternity you contain within you." – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Life
46. "If you want to propose marriage to your girlfriend and you live in England and she is in Sicily, do the decent thing and walk down there. Travelling by car or aeroplane wouldn't be right at such a moment." – Werner Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed
47. "It was one of those moments that you know at the time will stay with you to the grave: the sweet pie, the gaunt man playing the old music, the coals in the stove glowing orange, the scent of kerosene and hot breath. "Here's 'Evening Rhapsody.'" The music was so heavily romantic we both laughed. I thought: It is for this that I have come." – William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways
48. "One of the pleasures of travel is to dive into places where others are compelled to live and come out unscathed, full of the malicious pleasure of abandoning them to their fate." – Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories II
49. "You go away for a long time and return a different person – you never come all the way back." – Paul Theroux, Dark Star Safari
50. "Travelling through the world produces a marvellous clarity in the judgment of men. We are all of us confined and enclosed within ourselves, and see no farther than the end of our nose." – Michel de Montaigne
