"For the first time, it seemed clear to me that travel is not about finding something: It’s about getting lost -- that is, it is about losing yourself in a place and a moment. The little things that tether you to what’s familiar are gone, and you become a conduit through which the sensation of...

"For many, the whole process of intellectual and literary growth is a movement, not through or beyond, but away from the people and society they know best, the faiths they still at bottom accept, the little raw provincial world for which they keep an apologetic affection." --Wallace Stegner, "The Sound of Mountain Water"

"Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'Is this the condition that I feared?'" --Seneca, quoted in Timothy Ferriss's The 4-Hour Workweek (2007)

"Travel books or guidebooks are about as 'natural' a kind of text, as logical in their composition and in their use, as any book one can think of, precisely because of this human tendency to fall back on a text when the uncertainties of travel in strange parts seem to threaten one's equanimity. Many travelers...

"If you are accustomed to working 50 weeks per year, the tendency, even after creating the mobility to take extended trips, will be to go nuts and see 10 countries in 14 days and end up a wreck. It's like taking a starving dog to an all-you can eat buffet. It will eat itself to...

"Mapping out dozens of deeply focused trips around the world has convinced me that preparation no more spoils the chance for spontaneity and serendipity than discipline ruins the opportunity for genuine self-expression in sports, acting, or the tea ceremony." --Phil Cousineau, The Art of Pilgrimage (1998)

"The luxury traveler and his poorer cousin, the common tourist, are constantly encased in gleaming metals and other costly materials; preened mechanically by resentful lackeys; surfeited with overpriced, denutrified victuals; treated to vulgar and expensive entertainments; intentionally or unintentionally lied to; sneered at even by themselves; led like sheep through attractions that bore them. This...

"Money is multiplied in practical value depending on the number of W's you control in your life: what you do, when you do it, where you do it, and with whom you do it." --Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek (2007)

"Great stirrings of the mind have frequently followed great ages of travel. Throughout history by going to far places and seeing strange sights men have prodded their imagination. They have found amazement and delight and have reflected that life back home need not always remain what it has been. They have learned that there is...

"Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion...

"Technology [has a] knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." --Max Frisch, in Daniel Boorstin's The Image (1961)

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking that you have something to lose." --Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement 2005

"That's what I like about traveling -- you can sit down, maybe talk to someone interesting, see something beautiful, read a book, and that's enough to qualify as a good day. You do that at home and everyone thinks you're a bum." --Richard Linklater and Kim Krazan, Before Sunrise screenplay (1995)

"The sightseeing items which can be confidently guaranteed and conveniently and quickly delivered to tourists on arrival have these merchandisable qualities precisely because they are not native expressions of the country. They cannot be the real ritual or the real festival; that was never originally planned for tourists. Like the hula dances now staged for...

"The most dangerous thing a writer can do sometimes is to describe what he sees in front of his face, for the very ideals and assumptions that many of us live by are dependent upon maintaining a comfortable distance from the evidence." --Robert D. Kaplan, " Cultivating Loneliness ", Columbia Journalism Review , Jan-Feb 2006

"Few things are more ridiculous than the spectacle of a "budget traveler" losing his temper at a rickshaw driver over $0.10, while negotiating a ride to a bar where he'll blow $10 on beer." --Rolf Potts, Vagabonding (2003)

"Most people live...in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using only his little finger." --William James, The...

"Luxury, then, is a way of / being ignorant, comfortably / An approach to the open market / of least information. Where theories / can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins / without being cracked by ideas." --LeRoi Jones, "Political Poem" (1969)

"Our world harbors an uncharted territory, no longer white spaces on the map but black spaces, erected by political terrorism, defended not by insurmountable chains of mountains and impenetrable jungle, but by dogma, blood-lust and modern weapon technology, all of which are again closing the doors our curiosity had opened. But there are other countries...

"Schedule a day of rest every now and then. Contrary to what you might read, sudden insights seldom happen at the summit of a mountain, at the moment the whale is sighted, or in the face of some overwhelming bit of landscape. You haven't yet assimilated the experience. Look for epiphanies on those days when...