"As Alexander the Great was passing through Corinth, he sought our Diogenes and finally found him sitting under a tree, dressed in rags, with not a drachma to his name. When the most powerful man in the world asked the philosopher if he could do anything to help him, Diogenes replied, 'Yes, if you could...

"I love Paris and Rome, but students will learn far more if they step into different worlds where life is rather more different — say, India, or Burundi, or Bolivia. It's important to get out of our comfort zones, both because of what we learn about the rest of the world and also for the...

"Space and time, the two dimensions that we humans inhabit, are closely linked. 'Landscape is personal and tribal history made visible,' wrote the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in his book Space and Place . What he means, I think, is that places are like time machines. They transport us back to years past. As Rebecca Solnit...

"Perhaps no nation has been as uneasy in its view of travel as America. The one Western country that has always held expatriation to be something of a misdemeanor, if not an actual offense to patriotism or a form of social betrayal, it has never freed itself of the sense of guilt apparently rooted in...

"We must accept our reality as vastly as we possibly can; everything, even the unprecedented, must be possible within it. This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have...

"I hate looking at monuments. I hate waking up in the morning and thinking, 'Oh! Today we're gonna visit this abbey.' We don't do it at home, why should we do it abroad? The only thing I'm interested in is people, views, restaurants, and a clean, warm place to crap, as What's-his-name said. You never...

"The soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases. We go a journey chiefly to be free of all impediments and of all inconveniences; to leave ourselves behind, much more to get rid of others." --William Hazlitt, " On Going on a Journey " (1822)

"Writing travel pieces from your own backyard is difficult. For a start it's a masquerade. You can't look through fresh eyes and nothing much comes as a surprise. I display far more prejudice and a far shorter temper toward the folk over the garden wall than the ones I encounter over the ocean." --A.A. Gill,...

"If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest -- in all its ardor and paradoxes -- than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the...

"The books I don’t have a lot of time for are the frivolous ones: lovable people in Tuscany, or a little treasure of a man in Spain, or wonderful meals. The books about having a great time. I'm not too interested in them. But there are plenty of them because people have the fantasy of...

"Pierpont Morgan himself, though he traveled frequently to distract mind and body at doctors' orders, was burdened intolerably by the tasks he had undertaken. ...Traveling through Egypt in a resplendent private car, a companion of his noted how, at the receipt of cablegrams from New York, he would be plunged in long glowering calculations, hours...

"I don't know why it is so much more pleasurable to read a book on a train coach than in an armchair at home. There must be a parallel between one's life and one's book, each of them pleasingly held in suspense as they roll through possibilities. The be in that parenthetical state between Point...

"One plausible distinction between travel and tourism is that the traveler makes his or her own way, whereas tourists' paths have been beaten into submission long before they go, whether singly or as a group. The elision between the two types has often been a consequence of pocket guides. In the nineteenth century the Thorough...

"There is wisdom in turning as often as possible from the familiar to the unfamiliar: it keeps the mind nimble, it kills prejudice, and it fosters humor." --George Santayana, The Birth of Reason and Other Essays (1968)

"Most travelers hurry too much…the great thing is to try and travel with the eyes of the spirit wide open, and not too much factual information. To tune in, without reverence, idly -- but with real inward attention. You can extract the essence of a place once you know how. If you just get as...

"The heroic is no longer compelling. There are few places under the sun that cannot be found with the help of global positioning technology. Almost anyone can get to the top of a remote glacier and send a photo home via satellite phone. Travel, and travel literature, used to be about being the first person...

"We've forgotten the benefit of surface travel: It forces you to understand, deep in your bones, the distance you've covered; and it gradually eases you into a new context that exists not only outside your body, but inside your head." --Seth Stevenson, Grounded (2010)

"Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that's the stuff life is made of." --Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack , June 1746

"Travel is mostly about dreams — dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, confronting suspicious people, living in a hostile...

"An American asked why he calls the brothers of his parents and the husbands of his parents' sisters by the same kinship term, is likely to reply, 'Because they are all uncles,' or he may ask, 'What else could you call them?' Were he asked why he doesn't eat fruit salad or ice cream and...