Famous Quotes & Sayings

Gertrude Stein

When you get there, there isn't any there there.

Hans Christian Andersen

Travelling expands the mind rarely.

Hans Christian Andersen

To travel is to live.

Giuseppe Verdi

You may have the universe if I may have Italy.

Horace

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.

Herman Melville

In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.

Herman Melville

Traveling takes the ink out of one's pen as well as the cash out of one's purse.

Herman Melville

Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fire-side.

Herman Melville

The pleasure of leaving home, care-free, with no concern but to enjoy, has also as a pendant the pleasure of coming back to the old hearthstone, the home to which, however traveled, the heart still fondly turns, ignoring the burden of its anxieties and cares.

Herman Melville

For the profit of travel: in the first place, you get rid of a few prejudices.... The prejudiced against color finds several hundred millions of people of all shades of color, and all degrees of intellect, rank, and social worth, generals, judges, priests, and kings, and learns to give up his foolish prejudice.

Herman Melville

I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

Henry David Thoreau

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river.... The word is from the Latin villa, which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried.... Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.

Henry David Thoreau

I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure.

Henry David Thoreau

The other side of the globe is but the home of our correspondent. Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing.

Henry David Thoreau

To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery.

Henry David Thoreau

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it,--to penetrate to the shores of its Lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the black Nile that concerns us.

Henry David Thoreau

I am accustomed to think very long of going anywhere,--am slow to move. I hope to hear a response of the oracle first.

Henry David Thoreau

What is the use of going right over the old track again? There is an adder in the path which your own feet have worn. You must make tracks into the Unknown.

Henry David Thoreau

I am very little of a traveler.

Henry David Thoreau

Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.

Henry David Thoreau

I suspect that, if you should go to the end of the world, you would find somebody there going farther, as if just starting for home at sundown, and having a last word before he drove off.

Henry David Thoreau

Ktaadnis an Indian word signifying highest land,... very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, andit will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way.

Henry David Thoreau

He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly.

Henry David Thoreau

Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. The perfection of traveling is to travel without baggage.

Henry David Thoreau

I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is madeand at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.

Henry David Thoreau

Continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic.

Henry David Thoreau

So far as my experience goes, travelers generally exaggerate the difficulties of the way. Like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary; for what's the hurry?

Henry David Thoreau

A man may travel fast enough and earn his living on the road.

Henry David Thoreau

It makes no odds where a man goes or stays, if he is only about his business.

Henry David Thoreau

Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you still have a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey.

Henry David Thoreau

I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here!

Henry David Thoreau

When it was proposed to me to go abroad, rub oft some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, I fear lest my life will lose some of its homeliness. If these fields and streams and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and inspire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss.

Henry David Thoreau

When you are starting away, leaving your more familiar fields, for a little adventure like a walk, you look at every object with a traveler's, or at least with historical, eyes; you pause on the first bridge, where an ordinary walk hardly commences, and begin to observe and moralize like a traveler. It is worth the while to see your native village thus sometimes, as if you were a traveler passing through it, commenting on your neighbors as strangers.