“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography
I travel each morning through wunderful landscape on my mountainbike to work and from work. Through rain, snow, stormy weather and lovely sunshine. My bike is my true companion.
In the spirit of full disclosure, you must know I am an admitted travel addict and spiritual explorer. My life and the traveled paths I have chosen have been inspired by the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Make as many experiments as possible.
For me, travel is the greatest experiment. It brings forth curiosity and the urge to investigate the experience of being alive. When we travel we get out of the old and settled habits of our daily lives and feel inspired to see the world anew. This heightened sense of awareness stays with us when we go home and permanently influences our perspective on life. When I ride my bike to and from work, I always travel different ways, roads and paths to get new experiences.
As Kate Douglas Wiggins puts it, “There is a kind of magic about going far away and then coming back all changed.” Once you allow yourself to get a little lost, reduce any over-controlling tendencies, and lose the sense of urgency, you no longer want to return to your old habits. You feel like life is offering you a new beginning, and it is.”
Let these traveling quotes inspire you:
1. “Travel brings power and love back into your life.” – Rumi
2. “Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” – Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
3. “Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.” – Wendell Berry. A Place on Earth.
4. “The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” – Christopher McCandless
5. “To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,
To gain all while you give,
To roam the roads of lands remote,
To travel is to live.”
– Hans Christian Andersen. The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography.
6. “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/Roughing It.
7. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” – Henry Miller
8. “There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you’ve misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.” – Audrey Niffenegger. Her Fearful Symmetry.
9. “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.” – Jack Kerouac. On the Road.
10. “But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” – Bill Bryson. Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe.
11. “It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.” – Ernest Hemingway
12. “Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.” – Nicolas Bouvier. The Way of the World.
13. “Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
14. “Personally I like going places where I don’t speak the language, don’t know anybody, don’t know my way around and don’t have any delusions that I’m in control. Disoriented, even frightened, I feel alive, awake in ways I never am at home.” – Michael Mewshaw
15. “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” – Pico Iyer
16. “I travel light. But not at the same speed.” – Jarod Kintz. The Days of Yay are Here! Wake Me Up When They’re Over.
17. “I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet””that’s not a problem.” – Elizabeth Gilbert. Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage.
18. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese
19. “There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.” – John Steinbeck
20. “The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home — and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.” – Rolf Potts. Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.
21. “Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don’t talk in English and don’t even want to.” – Thornton Wilder. Our Town.
22. “We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on “good” rather than on “time”….” – Robert M. Pirsig. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values.
23. “There is a kind of magicness about going far away and then coming back all changed.” – Kate Douglas Wiggin. New Chronicles of Rebecca.
24. “Travellers understand, instinctively and by experience, that travel and adventure change and elongate time, even while navigating the deadlines of airline and train departures.” – Paul Sheehan
Love yourself, love your day, love your life!
Brian
