Quotes

“I looked on, I thought, I reflected, I admired, in a state of stupefaction not altogether unmingled with fear!”

—Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth

“The secret to so many artists living so long is that every painting is a new adventure. So, you see, they’re always looking ahead to something new and exciting. The secret is not to look back.”

–Norman Rockwell

“It’s in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.”

—Aaron Lauritsen, 100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip

“What is a Wanderess? Bound by no boundaries, contained by no countries, tamed by no time, she is the force of nature’s course.”

—Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“May your adventures bring you closer together, even as they take you far away from home.”

—Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey

“Always there has been an adventure just around the corner- and the world is still full of corners.”

–Roy Chapman Andrews

“But between now and then, there was Life; and he walked into it with his eyes and his heart wide open.”

–Neil Gaiman, The graveyard book

“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.”

–Christopher McCandless

“Until you step into the unknown, you don’t know what you’re made of.”

–Roy T. Bennett

“One way to get the most out of life is to look upon it as an adventure.”

–William feather

“Most people…are like a falling leaf that drifts and turns in the air, flutters, and falls to the ground. But a few others are like stars which travel one defined path: no wind reaches them, they have within themselves their guide and path.”

—Hermann Hesse

“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time!”

–Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

“There will always be those who feel more comfortable not venturing from the warmth of the hearth, but there are those who prefer to look out the window and wonder what is beyond the horizon.”

–Jimmy Buffett, A Salty Piece of Land

“I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it’s very difficult to find anyone.’
I should think so — in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things!
Make you late for dinner!”

–J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience”

–Eleanor Roosevelt

“If I’m an advocate for anything, it’s to move. As far as you can, as much as you can. Across the ocean, or simply across the river. The extent to which you can walk in someone else’s shoes or at least eat their food, it’s a plus for everybody. Open your mind, get up off the couch, move.”

–Anthony Bourdain

“Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades Forever and forever when I move. How dull it is to pause, to make an end, To rust unburnished, not to shine in use! As though to breathe were life!”

–Lord Alfred Tennyson

“Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.”

–J.K. Rowling, harry potter and the half blood prince

“Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey

“I can speak to my soul only when the two of us are off exploring deserts or cities or mountains or roads.”

—Paulo Coelho, Aleph

“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

“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

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

–Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol.11

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

—Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach

“The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast, and you miss all you are traveling for.”

–Louis L’Amour

“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, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography

“And so, does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take? I declare that no accomplishment has substance nearly as great as the road used to achieve it. We are not creatures of destinations. It is the journey that shapes us. Our callused feet, our backs strong from carrying the weight of our travels, our eyes open with the fresh delight of experiences lived.”

—Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found.”

–John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“Here today, up and off to somewhere else tomorrow! Travel, change, interest, excitement! The whole world before you, and a horizon that’s always changing!”

—Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

“Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road. Healthy, free, the world before me. The long brown path before me leading me wherever I choose. Henceforth, I ask not good fortune, I myself am good fortune. Henceforth, I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing.”

—Walt Whitman, Songs for the Open Road: Poems of Travel and Adventure

“…I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream”

–Virginia Woolf

“We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share. This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.”

–Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

“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, The Prophet

“The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

–G.K. Chesterton

“Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know.
Perhaps it is everywhere – on water and land.”

–Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Travel brings power and love back into your life.”

—Rumi Jalalud-Din

“Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than
for familiar ground.”

—Judith Thurman

“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

“That’s the place to get to—nowhere. One wants to wander away from the world’s somewheres, into our own nowhere.”

–D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

“So I find words I never thought to speak, In streets I never thought I should revisit, When I left my body on a distant shore.”

–T.S. Elliot

“See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask for no guarantees, ask for no security.”

–Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“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 Cévennes

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

—Lao Tzu

“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”

–John Muir, The Mountains of California