Posted on Thursday, 18 February 2021

Need some pithy (or not-so-pithy) quotes to inspire your next epic overseas trip? Sometimes it's difficult to face the unknown of travel - to wonder if all the train rides, plane rides, musty hotels, unpredictable cab drivers, over-washed salads - and a thousand yet-to-be-known moments, experiences, sights and smells - will be worth it.

There's only one way to find out.

Here are a scattering of inspirational nuggets penned by some of the world's best-known travel writers.

1 - "Travel. Your money will return. Your time won't.”   Unknown 

2 - “Surely, of all the wonders of the world, the horizon is the greatest.”  Freya Stark

3 - "Travel is glamorous only in retrospect."  Paul Theroux

4 - “There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.”  Mark Twain

5 - “If I were asked to enumerate the pleasures of travel, this would be one of the greatest among them - that so often and so unexpectedly you meet the best in human nature, and seeing it so by surprise and often with a most improbable background, you come, with a sense of pleasant thankfulness, to realize how widely scattered in the world are goodness and courtesy and the love of immaterial things, fair blossoms found in every climate, on every soil.”  Freya Stark

6 - "Some beautiful paths can't be discovered without getting lost.”  Erol Ozan

7 - "Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going."  Paul Theroux

8 - "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

9 - "Most travel, and certainly the rewarding kind, involves depending on the kindness of strangers, putting yourself into the hands of people you don't know and trusting them with your life.”  Paul Theroux

10 - "It liberates the vandal to travel — you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction.”  Mark Twain

11 - "Is there anything, apart from a really good chocolate cream pie and receiving a large unexpected cheque in the post, to beat finding yourself at large in a foreign city on a fair spring evening, loafing along unfamiliar streets in the long shadows of a lazy sunset, pausing to gaze in shop windows or at some church or lovely square or tranquil stretch of quayside, hesitating at street corners to decide whether that cheerful and homy restaurant you will remember fondly for years is likely to lie down this street or that one? I just love it. I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.”  Bill Bryson

12 - "Extensive traveling induces a feeling of encapsulation, and travel, so broadening at first, contracts the mind."  Paul Theroux

13 - "Travel [is] flight and pursuit in equal parts.”  Paul Theroux

14 - "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

15 - "You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back”  Paul Theroux

16 - "I have no reason to go, except that I have never been, and knowledge is better than ignorance. What better reason could there be for traveling?”  Freya Stark

17 - "I have found out there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”  Mark Twain

  

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