Paul Fussell on humility

"Travelers learn not just foreign customs and curious cuisines and unfamiliar beliefs and novel forms of government. They learn, if they are lucky, humility. Experiencing on their sense a world different from their own, they realize their provincialism and recognize their ignorance. 'Traveling makes one modest,' says Flaubert. 'You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.' Travel at its truest is this an ironic experience, and the best travelers -- and travel writers -- seem to be those able to hold two or three inconsistent ideas in their minds at the same time, or able to regard themselves at once serious persons and clowns."
--Paul Fussell, The Norton Book of Travel (1987)