"Herodotus was aware of man's sedentary nature and realized that to get to know Others you must set off on a journey, go to them, and show a desire to meet them; so he kept traveling, visiting the Egyptians and the Scythians, the Persians and the Lydians, remembering everything he heard from them, as well...

"But if the one definable feature of travel is that it has been a constant in human history, an irresistible lure to ambition or imagination, it has never achieved a reliable standing in literature. There has, in fact, always attached to it a hint of the deceptive or the deluding. 'There is nothing worse for...

"The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us." David Foster Wallace, Kenyon College commencement...

"Like embassies, five-star hotels go to great lengths to isolate, and insulate, themselves from the host country. It is possible to spend many days at a five-star hotel engaged in all sorts of productive activities — holding meetings, eating meals, exercising, getting married, watching movies — without ever stepping foot in the actual country where...

"For it is not only indolence that causes human relationships to be repeated from case to case with such unspeakable monotony and boredom; it is timidity before any new, inconceivable experience, which we don't think we can deal with. But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most...

"Wanderlust is not a passion for travel exactly, it’s something more animal and more fickle—more like lust. We don’t lust after very many things in life. We don’t need words like 'worklust' or 'homemakinglust.' But travel? The essayist Anatole Broyard put it perfectly: 'Travel is like adultery: one is always tempted to be unfaithful to...

"Eighty years ago, the British traveled the world and found it almost entirely a source of satire and contempt. Now many a traveler (from Seattle, let's say) is hungry to go to the Amazon, to Tibet, or the darkest parts of Africa, and find it a source of veneration. Here is life unspoiled; here are...

"Part of our identity comes from a sense of place; the context that gives us status and a sense of belonging in the world. So if the "real" nature of a place is, or becomes, something different than the narrative we've used to build our identities, what does that mean? At the very least, it...

"I believe that the remarks of a traveler in any country not his own, let his work be ever so trifling or badly written, will point out some peculiarity which will have escaped the notice of those who were born and reside in that country, unless they happen to be natives of that portion of...

"We complain incessantly about the 'fast pace of modern life,' and say that we have 'no time.' But of course most of us have lots of time, or else every study wouldn't show that we watch three or four or five hours and television a day. It's that time the way it really works has...

"It has been my prejudice and hope ever since I began reading and traveling that what we need now is a travel writing that reflects a larger world and a much more complex order, one in which a post-national empire is almost everywhere, and the American Empire is fading from view as the British and...

"The highest ethical calling, it strikes me, is curiosity. The greatest reverence, the greatest rapture, are in it." --Brian Christian "High Compression," AGNI #69 (2009)

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't...

"It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of comparing one race with another, and weighing in opposed groups the manners and customs of neighboring countries; but it is certain that as we move about the world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is especially the case if we happen to be...

"How does one see the thing better when others are absent? Is looking like sucking: the more lookers, the less there is to see?" --Walker Percy, "The Loss of the Creature" (1954)

"To travel somewhere is almost always to support someone and to exploit someone -- often the same person." --Donald Ross, quoted by Jason Wilson in Salon "Trip Lit", Jan. 26, 2000

"Travel, at its best, transforms us in ways that aren't always apparent until we're back home." --Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss (2008)

"Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist. For the latter, the interesting event is the new, the extraordinary, the comic, the shocking, and all that the peripatetic journalist requires is a flair for being on the spot where and when such events...

Each week Rolf brings us a new quote that makes us look at travel from a broader perspective, or perhaps in a different light. It’s interesting to note that some of these quotations come from all manner of sources, and not simply travel related literature. Indeed it seems easy to find fragments of writing that...

"I don’t believe in preserving culture. The real question is, what kind of world do we want to live in -- a monochromatic world of monotony, or a polychromatic world of diversity? The idea is not to eliminate modernity, as if we've got the right to sequester people like some kind of specimen in a...