"The practice of soulful travel is to discover the overlapping point between history and everyday life, the way to find the essence of every place, every day: in the markets, small chapels, out-of-the-way parks, craft shops. Curiosity about the extraordinary in the ordinary moves the heart of the traveler intent on seeing behind the veil...

"Travel by its very nature demands simplicity. If you don

"Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place." --Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (1988)

"Travel spoils you for regular life. When you're moving from country to country in blithe ignorance, you're usually granted the safe passage of a holy idiot." --Bill Barich, Traveling Light (1984)

"Demographers like to dramatize this recent population growth by asking a spooky question. Of all the people who have ever lived, how many are alive today? The answer requires a lot of guesswork, except for the very recent past; but a fair estimate for the number of people born throughout human history is 80 billion...

"It seemed an advantage to be traveling alone. Our responses to the world are crucially molded by the company we keep, for we temper our curiosity to fit in with the expectations of others. They may have particular visions of who we are and hence may subtly prevent certain sides of us from emerging… Being...

"What, then, is a traveling mind-set? Receptivity might be said to be its chief characteristic. Receptive, we approach new places with humility. We carry with us no rigid ideas about what is or is not interesting. We irritate locals because we stand in traffic islands and narrow streets and admire what they take to be...

"To the appeal that an attractive person might possess in one's own country is added, in an exotic land, an attraction deriving from his or her location. If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another country, one ambition...

"Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships, or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at time requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places....

"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...

"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...

"The goal of preparation is not knowing exactly where you

"I wished I had lived in the days of real journeys, when it was still possible to see the full splendor of a spectacle that had not yet been blighted, polluted and spoiled

"Tourists are less likely to borrow from their hosts than their hosts are from them, this precipitating a chain of change in the host community. The notion that people in more or less continuous, first-hand, face-to-face contact become more like each other should not be ignored just because tourists come and go. A tourist clientele...

"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)

"'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...

Good judgment can come from bad experiences; good experiences can come from bad judgment. --Rolf Potts, Vagabonding (2003)

"To travel somewhere is almost always to support someone and to exploit someone -- often the same person.

"Optimism is dangerous, because optimists don't believe in worst-case scenarios, and worst-case scenarios are what are used to frighten us into submission." -- Douglas Rushkoff , from an online interview , 1999

"Oh, I know your motives are good, they always are... I wish sometimes you had a few bad motives, you might understand a little more about human beings. And that applies to your country too, Pyle." Fowler to Pyle, in Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955) Note : Like so many travelers to Southeast Asia,...