BootsnAll Travel Community

Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe. ~Anatole France



It is not down in any map; true places never are. ~Herman Melville

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck

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

~Marcel Proust

I've got two favorites. They're not specifically about travel but I find them motivating.

"You either get busy living or you get busy dying"
from the movie The Shawshank Redemption


"Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We are only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand and melting like a snowflake."
from Mary Beyon Ray

Here's a few from "Vagabonding" by Rolf Potts:

"Vagabonding is about looking for adventure in normal life, and normal life within adventure. Vagabonding is an attitude-a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word."

"Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It's just an uncommon way of looking at life-a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time-our only real commodity-and how we choose to use it."

"Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate."

Some of my favorites:

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

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Robert Louis Stephenson

“Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages."
Dave Barry

This last is one of my favorites, since I do so much solo travel:

“The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.”
Henry David Thoreau

Jack Kerouac:

Take only memories, leave only footprints.
----Chief Seattle

If our map was torn, if your compass broke, navigate, navigate.
----Cedric

Two good ones:
Now voyager, sail forth to seek and find.
Walt Whitman


The true worth of your travels lies not in where you come to be at the journey's end, but in who you come to be along the way.
Author Unknown

Came across another nice one:

I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.
~Lillian Smith

"Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything." Charles Kuralt, On the Road With Charles Kuralt

"If traveling was a drug I'd sell it by the gram." - Unknown

"He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise." William Blake

"It does not matter if we cannot keep what we find - at least we once held it and hopefully gained from the experience before it slipped away. Enjoy the temporary for nothing lasts."