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Travel Quotes

Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, George Eliot, Dejan Stojanovic and Ray Bradbury lead the page. The line that rewards a second look is Chesterton’s, in Tremendous Trifles (1909): the whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land but at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land. Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest (1895) has a character who never travels without her diary, so that she has something sensational to read on the train.

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” is credited to Mark Twain and marked misattributed. Swift wrote something close to it in 1710, that falsehood flies and truth comes limping after. A rolling stone gathering no moss, credited to Publilius Syrus, is disputed.

Random quote on Travel

Most quoted on travel:

I depart,
Whither I know not; but the hour's gone by
When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.

Lord Byron

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

Anna Quindlen

They change their sky, not their mind, who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us.

Horace

As the Spanish proverb says, "He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.

Samuel Johnson Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)

Youth is the time for adventures of the body, but age for the triumphs of the mind.

Logan Pearsall Smith

Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry.

Thomas Gray

That's the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I was feeling like mad
by the melody of birds
singing out of tune
in the settlements
where travels lose
their own destinations.

Suman Pokhrel

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

Christina Rossetti

And in his brain,
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit
After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm'd
With observation, the which he vents
In mangled forms.

William Shakespeare

The true delight of travel, the one that is going to print itself unaccountably and indelibly on you, seems to prefer to come as a thief in the night, and not at the hours you specially fix for its entertainment.

Charles Edward Montague The Right Place (1924)

He who is everywhere is nowhere.

Seneca the Younger

Not all those who wander are lost.

J. R. R. Tolkien

I think it was Jekyll who used to say that the further he went west, the more convinced he felt that the wise men came from the east.

Sydney Smith

'Tis nothing when a fancied scene's in view
To skip from Covent Garden to Peru.

Richard Steele

Go far—too far you cannot, still the farther
The more experience finds you: And go sparing;—
One meal a week will serve you, and one suit,
Through all your travels; for you'll find it certain,
The poorer and the baser you appear,
The more you look through still.

John Fletcher

I am fevered with the sunset,
I am fretful with the bay,
For the wander-thirst is on me
And my soul is in Cathay.

Richard Hovey

My dear, life rarely gives us what we want at the moment we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually.

E. M. Forster

We sack, we ransack to the utmost sands
Of native kingdoms, and of foreign lands:
We travel sea and soil; we pry, and prowl,
We progress, and we prog from pole to pole.

Francis Quarles

I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land, or water.

Jonathan Swift Polite Conversation (1738)

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