Quotations and Poems

» “The time to enjoy a European tour is about three weeks after you unpack.”
– George Ade

»  ”The American arrives in Paris with a few French phrases he has culled from a conversational guide or picked up from a friend who owns a beret.”
– Fred A. Allen

»  ”My favorite thing is to go where I have never gone.”
– Diane Arbus

»  ”The more I want to get something done, the less I call it work.”
– Richard Bach

»  ”I am leaving the town to the invaders: increasingly numerous, mediocre, dirty, badly behaved, shameless tourists.”
– Brigitte Bardot

»  ”For the perfect idler, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen of the world, such are some of the minor pleasures of those independent, intense and impartial spirits, who do not lend themselves easily to linguistic definitions. The observer is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.”
– Charles Baudelaire

»  ”I have just been all round the world and have formed a very poor opinion of it.”
– Sir Thomas Beecham

»  ”In America there are two classes of travel — first class, and with children.”
– Horace Benchley

»  ”The traveler, however virginal and enthusiastic, does not enjoy an unbroken ecstasy. He has periods of gloom, periods when he asks himself the object of all these exertions, and puts the question whether or not he is really experiencing pleasure. At such times he suspects that he is not seeing the right things, that the characteristic, the right aspects of these strange scenes are escaping him. He looks forward dully to the days of his holiday yet to pass, and wonders how he will dispose of them. He is disgusted because his money is not more, his command of the language so slight, and his capacity for enjoyment so limited.”
– Arnold Bennett

»  ”I have been a stranger in a strange land.”
– Bible

»  ”Should we have stayed at home and thought of here? Where should we be today? Is it right to be watching strangers in a play in this strangest of theatres?”
– Elizabeth Bishop

»  ”What childishness is it that while there’s breath of life in our bodies, we are determined to rush to see the sun the other way around?”
– Elizabeth Bishop

»  ”Modern tourist guides have helped raised tourist expectations. And they have provided the natives — from Kaiser Wilhelm down to the villagers of Chichacestenango — with a detailed and itemized list of what is expected of them and when. These are the up-to-date scripts for actors on the tourists stage.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin

»  ”Not so many years ago there was no simpler or more intelligible notion than that of going on a journey. Travel –movement through space –provided the universal metaphor for change. One of the subtle confusions –perhaps one of the secret terrors –of modern life is that we have lost this refuge. No longer do we move through space as we once did.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin

»  ”The modern American tourist now fills his experience with pseudo-events. He has come to expect both more strangeness and more familiarity than the world naturally offers. He has come to believe that he can have a lifetime of adventure in two weeks and all the thrills of risking his life without any real risk at all.”
– Daniel J. Boorstin

»  ”There is no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.”
– Fanny Burney

»  ”Travel and society polish one, but a rolling stone gathers no moss, and a little moss is a good thing on a man.”
– John Burroughs

»  ”Travelers are like poets. They are mostly an angry race.”
– Sir Richard Burton

»  ”I am so convinced of the advantages of looking at mankind instead of reading about them, and of the bitter effects of staying at home with all the narrow prejudices of an Islander, that I think there should be a law amongst us to set our young men abroad for a term among the few allies our wars have left us.”
– Lord Byron

»  ”I swims in the Tagus all across at once, and I rides on an ass or a mule, and swears Portuguese, and have got a diarrhea and bites from the mosquitoes. But what of that? Comfort must not be expected by folks that go a pleasuring.”
– Lord Byron

»  ”Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents.”
– Italo Calvino

»  ”The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist see what he has come to see.”
– Gilbert K. Chesterton

»  ”The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”
– Gilbert K. Chesterton

»  ”The travel writer seeks the world we have lost –the lost valleys of the imagination.”
– Alexander Cockburn

»  ”The idea that seeing life means going from place to place and doing a great variety of obvious things is an illusion natural to dull minds.”
– Charles Horton Cooley

»  ”The routines of tourism are even more monotonous than those of daily life.”
– Mason Cooley

»  ”When one realizes that his life is worthless he either commits suicide or travels.”
– Edward Dahlberg

»  ”The personal appropriation of clich