"With the palms zipping past and the big sun burning down on the road ahead, I had a flash of something I hadn't felt since my first months in Europe. A mixture of ignorance, and a loose, what-the-hell kind of confidence that comes when a man picks up and begins to move in a hard,...

"Persons who propose to themselves a scheme for traveling, generally do it with a view to obtain one or more of the following ends, viz. First, to make curious collections as natural philosophers, virtuosos, or antiquarians. Secondly, to improve in painting, statuary, architecture and music. Thirdly, to obtain the reputation of being men of virtue,...

"There is a new type of traveler which is represented by nearly all the young men and women who managed to get paid to write travel books. One comes into frequent and agreeable contact with him in all parts of the world; his book, if finished, is nearly always worth reading. It is his duty,...

"With the arrival of ever-increasing numbers of visitors at traveler centers such as Thamel in Kathmandu or Koh Phangan in Thailand, a previously balanced exchange relationship becomes increasingly more asymmetrically skewed against the hosts, who become relegated to the status of service providers. As a consequence, hosts perceive the psychological rewards to be minimal and...

"Ironically, the best litmus test for measuring your vagabonding gumption is not found in travel, but in the process of earning your freedom to travel. Earning your freedom, of course, involves work -- and work is intrinsic to vagabonding for psychic reasons as much as financial ones. To see the psychic importance of work, one...

"No road offers more mystery than that first one you mount from the town you were born to, the first time you mount of your own volition, on a trip funded by your own coffee tin of wrinkled up dollars

"For as long as people have been writing about their journeys, they have been telling tales of the strange and the wondrous, of the tedious and the annoying, of the signs of past grandeur, of the petty nuisances of travel, of their encounters with danger, of their romances with strangers, of their moments of doubt...

"The sublime is a feeling provoked by certain kinds of landscape that are very large, very impressive and dangerous. Places like the wide-open oceans, the high mountains, the polar caps. The Sinai Desert, the Grand Canyon. These places do all sorts of things to us. It's interesting that around the end of the 18th century,...

"What was the fascination of the beach? Why did people like the beach? Didn't they have anything better to do? What chicken-brained fuckers they were." --Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye (1982) Note : I'll confess that Bukowski's quote isn't of the soaring, inspirational variety usually found on internet travel quote pages, but -- since I...

"Wanting to travel reflects a positive attitude. You want to see, to grow in experience, and presumably to become more whole as a human being. Vagabonding takes this a step further: it promotes the chances of sustaining and strengthening this positive attitude. As a vagabond, you begin to face your fears now and then, instead...

"From this hour I ordain myself loos'd of limits and imaginary lines, / Going where I list, my own master total and absolute, / listening to others, considering well what they say, / pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, / Gently, but with undeniable will divesting myself of the holds that would hold me." --Walt Whitman, "...

"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)

"In the establishment of modern society, the individual act of sightseeing is probably less important than the ceremonial ratification of authentic attractions as objects of ultimate value, a ratification at once caused by and resulting in a gathering of tourists around an attraction and measurable to a certain degree by the time and distance the...

"I had assumed that traveling was the crap bit you had to tolerate in order to get to the places you wanted to see, but it occurred to me that maybe the places were the shit bits that you had to tolerate in order to do the traveling." --William Sutcliffe, Are You Experienced? (1998)

"Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn't agree with you, but because you don't agree with something. It's not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one's journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or...

"Worldwide, we are seeing the transformation of cultures into 'local color', making peoples' cultures extensions of the modern mass media. Culture is being packaged, priced, and sold like building lots, rights-of-way, fast-food, and room service, as the tourist industry promises that the world is his/hers to use. All the 'natural resources', including cultural traditions, have...

"He who does not travel does not know the value of men." --quoted in Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (1987)

"In reality, travel is not a social contest, and vagabonding has never represented a caste on the tourist/traveler hierarchy. Depending upon circumstance, a sincere vagabonder could variously be called a traveler or a tourist, a pilgrim or a satyr, and victor or a victim, an individual seeker or a demographic trend. Indeed, the main conceit...

"If you really want to learn about a country, work there." --Charles Kuralt, A Life on the Road (1990)

"What I find is that you can go anywhere, you can do just about anything, if you're not in a hurry." --Tony the Beachcomber to Paul Theroux, Fresh-Air Fiend (2000) My thanks to Andie Miller for sharing this quote. It originally appeared in Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania , and I reference it in...