"We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything." --Jonah Lehrer, " Why We Travel ," Panorama Magazine (Deccember 2009)

The person you are matters more than the place to which you go. For that reason we should not make the mind a bondsman to any one place. Live in this belief: 'I am not born for any one corner of the universe; this whole world is my country.' If you saw this fact clearly,...

"According to Kant sublimity lies not in 'anything in nature' but in the 'capacity we have within us' to judge and enjoy without fear the very things that threaten us. Hence the subject of Kant's infinite ideas of reason is the tourist who repeatedly embarks on journeys in search of the extraordinary of enormity and...

"Tell most people you're a travel writer and you'll be greeted with exclamations of envy. Ask them to name a travel book they've recently read and, almost inevitably, you'll be met with silence." --Thomas Swick, " Are Travel Writers the New Poets? " World Hum , October 24, 2011

"Could there be something of the sacred left in the tourist’s experience today? As well as the similarities in scale, modern-day mass tourism maintains some of the metaphysical connotations of the pilgrimage. After all one does not actually purchase anything physical when planning a trip, rather its a means by which we can acquire experiences....

"People say that because of Google Earth and the 'net, travel is less of a priority. I would say the opposite is the case. The very fact of easy interconnection, and the illusion such contact creates of understanding, makes travel ever more necessary. The world is not what it seems. The peevish person in his...

"I am not sure I believe in national characters. I think it is nonsense to talk about the French being like this or the Italians like that. I agree that one of the flaws of the travel book is this assumption that there is a national stereotype. What I do like in the English travel...

"I want to know what it feels like to actually be in a place that I've always heard about, to be part of its daily atmosphere and rhythm. I don't need to see every famous sight, every last mosque and museum; art is all around me, wherever I look: intricately woven baskets in an Asian...

"There is an unavoidable truth about traveling: To travel is to make oneself a figure of potential ridicule. Travel makes us vulnerable. Most experienced travelers know their basic needs can be met wherever they may be. You just have to ask for what you want and accept what you get." --Stefany Anne Golberg, " You...

"What [tourists] bring to New Guinea, reinforced by the travel brochures, is clearly imaginary, that is, it is not based on any real assessment of the New Guineans, but is rather a projection from Western consciousness, with the reminder that the only way to explore the real is through one's symbolic system. The tourists say...

"All travel is to some extent the quest for difference, and the more different (or exotic, or wild) a place is, the better. That is why we get annoyed when we go camping only to find the woods full of yahoos with radios and coolers of beer, and why it can be a bit depressing...

"The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance which is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the ground); the appealing or repelling...

"The structure of tourism is basically identical to that of all ritual behavior: it first translates the tourist into a sacred world, then transforms/renews him, and finally returns him to normality. This other world is sacred because it is out of space and out of time. The normal rules are in abeyance (if not actually...

"With the plane the cities began to have the same slender relation to human needs that museums do. They became corridors of showcases echoing the departing forms of industrial assembly lines. The road is, then, used less and less for travel, and more and more for recreation. The traveler now turns to the airways, and...

"Now I live here, another island, that doesn't seem like one, but who decides? My blood was full of them; my brain bred islands. But that archipelago has petered out. I'm old. I'm bored, too, drinking my real tea, surrounded by uninteresting lumber. The knife there on the shelf -- it reeked of meaning, like...

"On the highway to Toledo [Spain] we passed several tour buses full of what looked like Americans, digital cameras already in hand, and as we drew past them I expressed infinite disdain, which I could easily do with my eyebrows, for every tourist whose gaze I met. My look accused them of supporting the war,...

"The great geographical Other, the faraway rest of the world, has been transformed by the pure possibility of access. The numbers of distance and time no longer mean what they used to. Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. "There" was then; "here" is now." --Sven Birkerts,...

"Strangers entering a new environment as temporary visitors find themselves, whatever their specific motives and purposes, in an ambiguous predicament. They are typically marked by a heightened awareness and attention to life, coupled with considerable cognitive and emotional disorientation. This predicament necessarily has an impact on their motivation and conduct. It induces them to seek...

1. Leave home 2. Go alone 3. Travel light 4. Bring a map 5. Go by land 6. Walk across a national frontier 7. Keep a journal 8. Read a novel that has no relation to the place you’re in 9. If you must bring a cell phone, avoid using it 10. Make a friend...

"There was another message, too: Once again, the more I gave myself to the world, the more I made myself vulnerable by putting myself completely at the disposal of people and situations in which I had no control, the more people took care of me, looked out for me. At first I had thought they...