"Nature didn't tell me: 'Don't be poor.' Nor indeed: 'Be rich.' But she does beg me: 'Be independent.'" --Nicolas de Chamfort, Maxims (1795)

"People have already had to rethink so many concepts of motion; and they will also gradually come to realize that what we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us. It is only because so many people have not absorbed and transformed their fates while they were living in...

"'Adventure travel' is a term I'm not entirely fond of, but I suppose we need it to distinguish modern modes of travel from those that entail some risk and hardship. By that definition, the act of getting from Point A to Point B on land or sea was an adventure for all travelers before the...

"As we travel, we can feel that something important is happening, that we are taking part in something of which we are at once both witnesses and creators, that there is a duty incumbent upon us, and that we are responsible for something. And in fact we are responsible for the road we are traveling....

"Writers are often misled by the exoticness of foreign places. Their perceptions are distorted by it. As a result, they don't consider the people they meet there as truly human in an everyday sense that they would ascribe to people 'back home.' So when I'm reporting an international story I do my best to strip...

"Understanding other peoples is important also because such understanding increases our self-knowledge and objectivity. We grow up with the assumption that our own way of doing things is the right way, if not the only way. Yet we are aware of many problems for which we do not know the solutions. A knowledge of the...

"Those who have gone native are easy to identify. They speak the local language, get the local humor. They wear the local dress. In some cases, they develop immunities to local microbes. I remember meeting an Englishman who had lived in India for so long he could actually drink the tap water and not die....

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime." --Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad (1869)

"Saint Augustine declared that “the world is a book, and those who have not traveled have read only one page.” Only firsthand experience can validate or challenge our intuitions, giving us confidence about risky political decisions in a complex world of instant feedback loops and unintended consequences. During travel, perception and thought merge; a contradiction...

"Culture is the sea we swim in -- so pervasive, so all-consuming, that we fail to notice its existence until we stop out of it. It matters more than we think." --Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss (2008)

"Other people's heads are too wretched a place for true happiness to have its seat." --Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the...

"Travel, of course, is far from being the privilege or prerogative of modern times. It is one of the earliest and oldest of man's activities, its history coexistive with that of the race itself, a primary impulse of the human species and a major determinant of history. Whether as migration or exploration, science or pleasure,...

" Homicide , The Corner , The Wire , Generation Kill -- these are travelogues of a kind, allowing Average Reader/Viewer to go where he otherwise would not. He loves being immersed in a new, confusing, and possibly dangerous world that he will never see. He likes not knowing every bit of vernacular or idiom....

"I think the challenge is what it's always been, which is to make the reader see a place, experience a place, smell the place, hear the voices. It's like the great challenge in fiction, which is to persuade the reader that he or she is there in the place and seeing it. It’s quite a...

"Recall that earlier generations…understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint. …For we...

"Adrift in a faraway land, there is nothing quite as reassuring as the hermetic comfort of a five-star hotel. Long driveways, modern-day moats, separate you from the country out there. Once inside the sliding glass doors, life is air-conditioned in every sense of the word. The message is clear: Why leave this palace when everything...

"But the routine of the beggars is heart-rending. The little girl who suddenly appeared at the window of my taxi, the utterly lovely smile with which she stretched out her hand, and then the extinguishing of the light when she drew it back empty. I had no Indian money yet. She fell away from the...

"Travel is a form of digression, a digression from daily life. We travel for difference, and so we concentrate on those things — the buildings, the food, the people — that distinguish this place from that, and not on what they have in common. On the one hand that lets us see what the inhabitants...

"As a host community adapts to tourism, its facilitation to tourists' needs, attitude, and values, the host community must become more like the tourists' culture. That is what tourists in search of the exotic and 'natural' vacation setting mean when they say a place has been 'spoiled' by tourism, i.e., those who got there before...