Editor's Note: "Travel" comes from a root meaning "to toil or labor" (think of "travail," from the same root). The following quotes don't skimp on reminding us of travel's pleasures, but they also point towards a way of traveling that learns and gives — requiring some worthwhile effort — as well as enjoys. And it's more all-encompassing than we sometimes realize.
TRAVEL IS:
About the Journey
"The way to take a journey is not to be concerned about arrivals or departures or in search of something wondrous like Marco Polo or the Three Magi. The journey is everything — to another country, another time, another person's life. And everything is a journey."
— Helen Bevington, American poet
"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving."
— Lao Tzu, ancient Chinese philosopher
"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move."
— Robert Lewis Stevenson, Scottish novelist and travel writer
"To travel hopefully is better than to arrive."
— Robert Louis Stevenson, "El Dorado" in Virginibus Puerisque
"It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end."
― Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness
Better When Shared
"In my travels, some of the most enriching moments would have been mediocre had I experienced them alone. Travelling with others is very much about the shared adventure. At heart, shared travel is about forming deeper connections with the loved ones in our lives. Whilst more challenging, travelling solo allows us to see the world at our own pace and can give us an unparalleled sense of achievement."
― Sarah Samuel in Mindful Travelling
"A journey is best measure in friends, not miles."
— Tim Cahill, adventure travel writer
Carried Within
“Everything I was I carry with me, everything I will be lies waiting on the road ahead.”
― Ma Jian in Red Dust: A Path Through China
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson in "Art" in Essays: First Series
"Our real journey in life is interior, it is a matter of growth, deepening, and an ever greater surrender to the creative action of love and grace in our hearts."
— Thomas Merton in The Asian Journal
A Contemplative Act
"To see and know a place is a contemplative act. It means emptying our minds and letting what is there, in all its multiplicity and endless variety, come in."
— Gretel Ehrlich, "Landscape," introduction to Legacy of Light
"Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection."
— Lawrence Durrell, British novelist and travel writer
Dancing Lessons from God
"Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God."
— Kurt Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle
A Delight
"To me travel is a triple delight: anticipation, performance, and recollection."
— Ilka Chase in The Carthaginian Rose
"Few such moments of exhilaration can come as that which stands at the threshold of wild travel."
— Gertrude Bell in The Book of Roads by Phil Cousineau
"All travelers are optimistic. Travel itself was a sort of optimism in action."
— Paul Theroux, American travel writer and novelist
A Doorway to Imagination
"Laurens van der Post, in a wonderful book about an ocean voyage he took as a young man to Japan, speaks of the voyage as helping him go 'into a great undiscovered country of my own imagination, which I could not have entered any other way.' "
— Jean Dalby and Wallace Clift in The Archetype of Pilgrimage
Encompassing of All Experience
"I travel in large part in search of hardship—both my own, which I want to feel, and others', which I need to see. Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compassion—of seeing the world clearly, and yet feeling it truly."
— Pico Iyer in Pilgrim by Leonard J. Biallas
"To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live."
— Hans Christian Andersen, Danish fairy tale writer
"Tout est le chemin. Everything is a road."
— Alexis De Tocqueville in The Book of Roads by Phil Cousineau
"Life is a journey, the universe an inn."
— Buddha in The Book of Roads by Phil Cousineau
An Encouragement to Give Thanks
"We need to contemplate our fortunate circumstances.
"It is hard for that to have impact in America, where there is so much material comfort, particularly if you have never gone to a country that is very poor. But it is shocking if we travel to India, for example, where so many people will never have even the most basic things that we take for granted — all of a sudden we realize how precious our situation is. We realize that on our worst day, our worst, bad day when we do not get what we want, we are a hundred times better off than so many human beings. When you sit here, contemplating your precious human birth sounds almost like a joke, but when you go there it hits you so hard, you realize, 'I'm really very fortunate, I should stop complaining.' "
— Sakyong Mipham in In the Presence of Masters by Reginald A. Ray
The End of Narrow-mindedness
"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."
— Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad
“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine, Catholic theologian
"As we venture to new lands, taking with us our own culturally conditioned beliefs and perspective on the world, it is easy to forget that we are the foreigners. As we become more mindful of how our experiences contrast to that which we are used to, we can question what it is that makes us who we are beyond our conditioning, opening to our own truth, and in turn meeting others in theirs."
― Sarah Samuel in Mindful Travelling
Enriching to Life at Home
"If you belonged to the Ojibwa or some other rooted people, when you returned from a long and perilous journey, your family and neighbors would ask if you learned a new song, met a new animal, came upon a healing herb or a source of food or a holy place. What vision had you brought back for the community? The prime reason for traveling, after all, was to enrich the life at home."
— Scott Russell Sanders in Writing from the Center
"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land. It is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land."
— G. K. Chesterton, English mystery novelist and Christian apologist
"It is a strange thing to come home. While yet on your journey, you cannot at all realize how strange it will be."
— Selma Lagerlof in The Book of Roads by Phil Cousineau
"Travel may last a few days, but the time spent going over our trip, thinking and reflecting, can last a lifetime. The journey we have taken may have given us amazing experiences, expanding our being and sense of what is possible, but it is only through being still that we can begin to integrate this into our everyday lives. For it is in stillness that we can reconnect with our new-found sense of freedom and possibility, and what we have learnt about who we are beyond our conditioning. In this way, we know that the real road back home is the one that leads back to our true self."
— Sarah Samuel in Mindful Travelling
"'Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.'"
— Terry Pratchett in A Hat Full of Sky
An Entry into the Unknown
"I have been a stranger in a strange land."
— Exodus II: 22
"The physical aspect of travel is, for me, the least interesting; what really draws me is the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don't know, and may never know. Confronted by the foreign, we grow newly attentive to the details of the world, even as we make out sometimes, the larger outline that lies behind them."
— Pico Iyer in Sun after Dark
"A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places."
— Isabelle Eberhardt in The Passionate Nomad
"If you come to a fork in the road, you should take it."
— Yogi Berra in The Book of Roads by Phil Cousineau
"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."
— Martin Buber in Pilgrim by Leonard J. Biallas
"Other species migrate across continents and span oceans in pursuit of food and mates. They travel to get somewhere. Humans, by contrast, often travel to lose themselves — ecstatically — in something larger than ourselves. That ecstasy is never far away from those who remain open to being surprised."
— Richard Schiffman quoted in "Radical Travel," Yes! magazine
"Once a year, go someplace you've never been before."
— His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the state and spiritual leader of the Tibetan people
“What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.”
― Jack Kerouac in On the Road
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien in The Fellowship of the Ring
A Given
"What can we do? We were born with the Great Unrest."
— Caribou Eskimo to Knud Rasmussen in The Book of Roads by Phil Cousineau
"Now more than ever do I realize that I will never be content with a sedentary life, that I will always be haunted by thoughts of a sun-drenched elsewhere."
― Isabelle Eberhardt in The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt
"We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the seeds of the tenacious plant, and it is in our ripeness and our fullness of heart that we are given to the wind and are scattered."
― Kahlil Gibran in The Prophet
A Metaphor
"What is more beautiful that the road?
It is the symbol and image of an active, varied life.
Each of us should make a map of our loft fields and meadows."
― George Sand in The Book of Roads by Phil Cousineau
"All life is figure and ground and a wandering to find home."
― Samuel Beckett in The Book of Roads by Phil Cousineau
A Mutual Exchange with Staying Put
"Say I am a traveler, one who loves to be on a journey, who draws life from adventure, but I have a friend who is a dweller, who is at peace only at home and even on a journey is trying always to make a home wherever we are. When my own traveler's heart goes out to my dweller's heart, the part of me that is a dweller comes to life, the part that wants to find rest in my restlessness. Places in my heart come to life, places of peace and beauty, places of rest and dwelling, that allow me to understand my friend's heart. It is as if there were a place where once we lived together in peace and we are always trying to find our way back there again.
"Together we will take the road that leads into the West,
And far away will find a land where both our hearts may rest.
"To understand each other, the dweller has to be willing to travel and the traveler to dwell, as we journey home together."
— John S. Dunne in The Music of Time
"How could I go on my travels without that sweet soul waiting at home for my letters?"
— Caryl Churchill in Top Girls
"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving."
― Terry Pratchett in A Hat Full of Sky
Mythical
"It is impossible to take a train or an airplane without having a fantasy of oneself as a Quest Hero setting off in search of an enchanted princess or the Waters of Life."
— W.H. Auden in Pilgrim by Leonard J. Biallas
Not Easy to Start
"He who is outside his door already has the hardest part of his journey behind him."
— Dutch proverb
An Opportunity to Discover Many Ways of Living
"One benefit of travel is the opportunity to see the world's soul in the concrete and discover the many ways life can be lived out. If we reduce travel to transportation, we withhold soul from our movements, and then, for all our moving around and getting from place to place, the soul goes unfed. Travel is a profound mystery, but for it to speak to the soul, we have to go about it with care, especially inviting the soul to share in the experience."
— Thomas Moore in The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life
"The greatest fear of ardent travelers is that one day the world will be homogenized."
— Anatole Broyard, American literary critic
A Reminder of Oneness
"If you travel far enough, one day you will recognize yourself coming down the road to meet yourself. And you will say — YES."
— Marion Woodman in Writing from Life by Susan Witting Albert
"Something is coming alive in a new way.
"People are making connections on many different levels, through global trade, travel, telecommunications, conferences, and other forms of gatherings. . . .
"We have yet to realize that this is all a part of the organism of life recreating itself on the pattern of oneness. We see these changes with the eyes of individuality and fragmentation that focus on the individual parts, still caught in the complex images of a decaying culture. The real picture is an emerging wholeness that is a life force in itself. Life is reconnecting itself in order to survive and evolve."
— Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee in Awakening the World
Sacred
"We need to believe that there is something sacred waiting to be discovered in virtually every journey."
— Phil Cousineau in The Art of Pilgrimage
Shaped by Intention
" 'Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?' Alice asked the Cheshire Cat. 'That depends a good deal on where you want to go.' "
— Lewis Carroll in The Book of Roads by Phil Cousineau
Shorter with Good Company
"Good company in a journey makes the way to seem the shorter."
— Izaak Walton in The Compleat Angler
A Transformation
"Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."
— Miriam Beard in Realism in Romantic Japan
"Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life — and travel — leaves marks on you. Most of the time, those marks — on your body or on your heart — are beautiful. Often, though, they hurt."
— Anthony Bourdain in The Nasty Bits
"I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world."
— Mary Anne Radmacher, author and artist
A Unique Kind of Spirituality
"Travel gives rise to its own kind of spirituality: to a grand appreciation for community, to a passionate love of this earth, to an urgent longing for transcendence, and even to a sweet foretaste of death."
— Thomas Moore in The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life
"The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. … It is the wayfarer down the open road."
— D.H. Lawrence, English novelist, poet, and playwright
"What's yer road, man — holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road? It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow."
— Jack Kerouac in The Book of Roads by Phil Cousineau
Valuable
"To travel is worth any cost or sacrifice."
― Elizabeth Gilbert in Eat, Pray, Love
Within Range of the Divine
"We can never travel beyond the arms of the Divine."
— Martin Luther King, Jr. in The Gift of Kabbalah by Tamar Frankiel
