Famous Quotes & Sayings

Henry David Thoreau

I am accustomed to think very long of going anywhere,--am slow to move. I hope to hear a response of the oracle first.

Henry David Thoreau

What is the use of going right over the old track again? There is an adder in the path which your own feet have worn. You must make tracks into the Unknown.

Henry David Thoreau

I am very little of a traveler.

Henry David Thoreau

Far travel, very far travel, or travail, comes near to the worth of staying at home.

Henry David Thoreau

I suspect that, if you should go to the end of the world, you would find somebody there going farther, as if just starting for home at sundown, and having a last word before he drove off.

Henry David Thoreau

Ktaadnis an Indian word signifying highest land,... very few, even among backwoodsmen and hunters, have ever climbed it, andit will be a long time before the tide of fashionable travel sets that way.

Henry David Thoreau

He who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly.

Henry David Thoreau

Even the elephant carries but a small trunk on his journeys. The perfection of traveling is to travel without baggage.

Henry David Thoreau

I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all that is madeand at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.

Henry David Thoreau

Continued traveling is far from productive. It begins with wearing away the soles of the shoes, and making the feet sore, and erelong it will wear a man clean up, after making his heart sore into the bargain. I have observed that the afterlife of those who have traveled much is very pathetic.

Henry David Thoreau

So far as my experience goes, travelers generally exaggerate the difficulties of the way. Like most evil, the difficulty is imaginary; for what's the hurry?

Henry David Thoreau

A man may travel fast enough and earn his living on the road.

Henry David Thoreau

It makes no odds where a man goes or stays, if he is only about his business.

Henry David Thoreau

Some hard and dry book in a dead language, which you have found it impossible to read at home, but for which you still have a lingering regard, is the best to carry with you on a journey.

Henry David Thoreau

I want nothing new, if I can have but a tithe of the old secured to me. I will spurn all wealth beside. Think of the consummate folly of attempting to go away from here! When the constant endeavor should be to get nearer and nearer here!

Henry David Thoreau

When it was proposed to me to go abroad, rub oft some rust, and better my condition in a worldly sense, I fear lest my life will lose some of its homeliness. If these fields and streams and woods, the phenomena of nature here, and the simple occupations of the inhabitants should cease to interest and inspire me, no culture or wealth would atone for the loss.

Henry David Thoreau

When you are starting away, leaving your more familiar fields, for a little adventure like a walk, you look at every object with a traveler's, or at least with historical, eyes; you pause on the first bridge, where an ordinary walk hardly commences, and begin to observe and moralize like a traveler. It is worth the while to see your native village thus sometimes, as if you were a traveler passing through it, commenting on your neighbors as strangers.

Henry David Thoreau

It is far more independent to travel on foot. You have to sacrifice so much to the horse. You cannot choose the most agreeable places in which to spend the noon., commanding the finest views, because commonly there is no water there, or you cannot get there with your horse.

Henry David Thoreau

This is a common experience in my traveling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.

Henry David Thoreau

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead.

Henry David Thoreau

The discoveries which we make abroad are special and particular; those which we make at home are general and significant. The further off, the nearer the surface. The nearer home, the deeper.

Henry David Thoreau

Give me the old familiar walk, postoffice and all, with this ever new self, with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten. We'll go nutting once more. We'll pluck the nut of the world, and crack it in the winter evenings. Theaters and all other sightseeing are puppet-shows in comparison. I will take another walk to the Cliff, another row on the river, another skate on the meadow, be out in the first snow, and associate with the winter birds. Here I am at home. In the bare and bleached crust of the earth I recognize my friend.

Henry David Thoreau

A traveler who looks at things with an impartial eye may see what the oldest inhabitant has not observed.

Henry David Thoreau

Today you may write a chapter on the advantages of traveling, and tomorrow you may write another chapter on the advantages of not traveling.

Henry David Thoreau

Only the traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better.

Henry David Thoreau

I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

Eugene Ionesco

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Eugene Ionesco

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

Ernest Hemingway

How lazily the sun goes down in Granada, it hides beneath the water, it conceals in the Alhambra!

Ernest Hemingway

Writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.

Eudora Welty

Travel itself is part of some longer continuity.

Erma Bombeck

I have paid as much as $300 a night to throw up into a sink shaped like a seashell.

Erma Bombeck

Once you see the drivers in Indonesia you understand why religion plays such a part in their lives.