Why Travel?

Here's what some folks have to say about that....

I'm also going to have a link above for this post.

“Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring  

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― Augustine of Hippo 

“Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life 

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
― Laozi 

“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, A Hat Full of Sky 

“I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes 

“A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.”
― Laozi 

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It 

“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, On the Road 

“It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.”
― Ernest Hemingway 

“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, The Nomad: The Diaries of Isabelle Eberhardt 

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
― Marcel Proust 

“I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
― Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad 

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
― G.K. Chesterton 

“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.”
― Anna Quindlen, How Reading Changed My Life 

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson's Essays 

“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas 

“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”
― Gustave Flaubert 

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring 

“One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.”
― Henry Miller 

“...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.”
― David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas  

“I read; I travel; I become”
― Derek Walcott 

“It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin 

“Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.”
― Tennessee Williams, Camino Real  

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”
― Pat Conroy 

“Self-consciousness kills communication.”
― Rick Steves 

“The farther you go, however, the harder it is to return. The world has many edges, and it's easy to fall off.”
― Anderson Cooper 

“We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.”
― John Lubbock, The Pleasures of Life 

“No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.”
― Banana Yoshimoto, Goodbye Tsugumi 

“Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.”
― Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader 

“Travel brings wisdom only to the wise. It renders the ignorant more ignorant than ever.”
― Joe Abercrombie, Last Argument of Kings 

“I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson 

“The person you have known a long tme is embedded in you like a jewel. The person you have just met casts out a few glistening beams & you are fascinated to see more of them. How many more are there? With someone you've barely met the curiosity is intoxicating.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye 

“My dream is to walk around the world. A smallish backpack, all essentials neatly in place. A camera. A notebook. A traveling paint set. A hat. Good shoes. A nice pleated (green?) skirt for the occasional seaside hotel afternoon dance.”
― Maira Kalman, The Principles of Uncertainty  

“A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.”
― George Augustus Moore, The Brook Kerith 

“It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return. Such are the melancolies du voyage: perhaps they are one of the most rewarding things about traveling.”
― Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour 

“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. Nearly every American hungers to move.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America 

“A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.”
― Ryszard Kapuściński, Travels with Herodotus  

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”
― Paul Theroux 

“One travels long distances not solely for large gatherings, but for something more intangible. I have always gone out on a limb for love. A dangerous, romantic, disappointing way to live.”
― Jennifer Ball, Higher Math: The Book Moose Minnion Never Wrote: A Novel 

“We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.”
― Jawaharlal Nehru 

“My grandfather says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. "To travel without moving an inch.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake  

“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more."

(Letter to John Banister, Jr., June 19, 1787)”
― Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 11: January 1787 to August 1787 

“Tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.”
― Alex Garland, The Beach  

“Once the travel bug bites there is no known antidote, and I know that I shall be happily infected until the end of my life”
― Michael Palin 

“I suspected, however, that I wasn't homesick for anything I would find at home when I returned. The longing was for what I wouldn't find: the past and all the people and places there were lost to me.”
― Alice Steinbach, Without Reservations: The Travels of an Independent Woman  

“It is better to fill your head with useless knowledge than no knowledge at all.”
― Jim Hinckley, Route 66 Backroads: Your Guide to Scenic Side Trips & Adventures from the Mother Road 

“A good traveler leaves no tracks. Good speech lacks fault-finding.”
― Laozi 

“It is not the destination where you end up but the mishaps and memories you create along the way!”
― Penelope Riley, Travel Absurdities 

“Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson 

“The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel 

“No changing of place at a hundred miles an hour will make us one whit stronger, or happier, or wiser. There was always more in the world than man could see, walked they ever so slowly; they will see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace. It does a bullet no good to go fast; and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”
― John Ruskin 

“But there are people who take salt with their coffee. They say it gives a tang, a savour, which is peculiar and fascinating. In the same way there are certain places, surrounded by a halo of romance, to which the inevitable disillusionment you experience on seeing them gives a singular spice. You had expected something wholly beautiful and you get an impression which is infinitely more complicated than any that beauty can give you. It is the weakness in the character of a great man which may make him less admirable but certainly more interesting.

Nothing had prepared me for Honolulu...”
― W. Somerset Maugham 


OK, folks, enough of these. I'd like to thank all the good members of Goodreads for compiling these. If you want to read more, go here.   

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/travel