Travel Journey Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Travel Journey. Here they are! All 100 of them:

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Not all those who wander are lost.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1))
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Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
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Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)
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The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
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Lao Tzu
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It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.
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Ursula K. Le Guin (The Left Hand of Darkness)
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We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls.
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AnaΓ―s Nin (The Diary of AnaΓ―s Nin, Vol. 7: 1966-1974)
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We are travelers on a cosmic journey,stardust,swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.
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Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist)
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All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost.
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J.R.R. Tolkien (The Fellowship of the Ring (The Lord of the Rings, #1))
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Not I, nor anyone else can travel that road for you. You must travel it by yourself. It is not far. It is within reach. Perhaps you have been on it since you were born, and did not know. Perhaps it is everywhere - on water and land.
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Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass)
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You’ll learn, as you get older, that rules are made to be broken. Be bold enough to live life on your terms, and never, ever apologize for it. Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. Laugh in the face of adversity, and leap before you look. Dance as though EVERYBODY is watching. March to the beat of your own drummer. And stubbornly refuse to fit in.
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Mandy Hale (The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass)
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Some beautiful paths can't be discovered without getting lost.
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Erol Ozan
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We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.
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Henry Ward Beecher
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A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead.
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Lemony Snicket (The Slippery Slope (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #10))
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And so, does the destination matter? Or is it the path we take? I declare that no accomplishment has substance nearly as great as the road used to achieve it. We are not creatures of destinations. It is the journey that shapes us. Our callused feet, our backs strong from carrying the weight of our travels, our eyes open with the fresh delight of experiences lived.
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Brandon Sanderson (The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, #1))
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...there ain't no journey what don't change you some.
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David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
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Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.
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Pat Conroy
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The journey itself is my home.
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Matsuo Bashō
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No matter where you are, you're always a bit on your own, always an outsider.
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Banana Yoshimoto (Goodbye Tsugumi)
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All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
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Martin Buber
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A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
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John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
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There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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I tramp a perpetual journey.
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Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)
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There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.
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Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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You read and write and sing and experience, thinking that one day these things will build the character you admire to live as. You love and lose and bleed best you can, to the extreme, hoping that one day the world will read you like the poem you want to be.
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Charlotte Eriksson
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The struggles we endure today will be the β€˜good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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In peace, may you leave this shore. In love, may you find the next. Safe passage on your travels, until our final journey to the ground. May we meet again.
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The 100
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The journey I'm taking is inside me. Just like blood travels down veins, what I'm seeing is my inner self and what seems threatening is just the echo of the fear in my heart.
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Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore)
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A good traveller is one who knows how to travel with the mind.
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Michael Bassey Johnson (The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes)
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Life is an experimental journey undertaken involuntarily. It is a journey of the spirit through the material world and, since it is the spirit that travels, it is the spirit that is experienced. That is why there exist contemplative souls who have lived more intensely, more widely, more tumultuously than others who have lived their lives purely externally.
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Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
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The pleasure we derive from journeys is perhaps dependent more on the mindset with which we travel than on the destination we travel to.
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Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
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If life is a journey then let my soul travel and share your pain.
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Santosh Kalwar
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The journey is part of the experience - an expression of the seriousness of one's intent. One doesn't take the A train to Mecca.
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Anthony Bourdain (A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines)
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Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.
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Anthony Bourdain (No Reservations: Around the World on an Empty Stomach)
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The best traveler is one without a camera.
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Kamand Kojouri
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β€ŽI have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.
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Jon Ronson (The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry)
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I want my life to be the greatest story. My very existence will be the greatest poem. Watch me burn. Love always, Charlotte
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Charlotte Eriksson (Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps)
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I may be going nowhere, but what a ride.
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Shaun Hick
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There are still more days to travel in this life. And he knows that the man who makes the journey has been shaped by every day and every person along the way. Scars are just another kind of memory....Soon enough the days will close over their lives, the grass will grow over their graves, until their story is just an unvisited headstone.
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M.L. Stedman (The Light Between Oceans)
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Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
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Matsuo Bashō
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There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.
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Wendell Berry (Remembering)
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Each of us has the right and the responsibility to assess the roads which lie ahead, and those over which we have traveled, and if the future road looms ominous or unpromising, and the roads back uninviting, then we need to gather our resolve and, carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that as well.
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Maya Angelou (Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now)
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The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.
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Guillermo del Toro
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If a traveller does not meet with one who is his better, or his equal, let him firmly keep to his solitary journey; there is no companionship with a fool.
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Gautama Buddha
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A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill. Indeed, there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable.
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Ryszard KapuΕ›ciΕ„ski (Travels with Herodotus)
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Imagine your worst day, multiply it by a hundred, and pray to your God that you never experience what some of the people in this war zone go through, everyday, without any hope of it getting better. Ever. Compared to these people, every day, no matter how bad, is the best day ever. I know nothing about pain, nothing about suffering and hopefully never will.
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Hendri Coetzee (Living the Best Day Ever)
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They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey.
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Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
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Most of the time, beauty lies in the simplest of things.
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Winna Efendi (The Journeys)
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It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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Life's trials will test you, and shape you, but don’t let them change who you are.” ~ Aaron Lauritsen, β€˜100 Days Drive
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.
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Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler)
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Life is a journey, Frannie darling," Feagan had once told me. "Choose well those with whom you travel." As always, I've followed Feagan's counsel.
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Lorraine Heath (Surrender to the Devil (Scoundrels of St. James, #3))
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Whither will my path yet lead me? This path is stupid, it goes in spirals, perhaps in circles, but whichever way it goes, I will follow it.
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Hermann Hesse (Siddharta)
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You haven't really been anywhere until you've got back home.
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Terry Pratchett (The Light Fantastic (Discworld, #2; Rincewind, #2))
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I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel...
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Ernesto Che Guevara (The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey)
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I'm with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night.
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Allen Ginsberg (Howl and Other Poems)
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Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.
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Jeanette Winterson (Sexing the Cherry)
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East, West, South or North makes little difference. No matter what your destination, just be sure to make every journey, a journey within. If you travel within, you’ll travel the whole wide world and beyond.
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Elif Shafak (The Forty Rules of Love)
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I knew then that I wanted to go home, but I had no home to go to--and that is what adventures are all about.
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Trina Schart Hyman (Self-Portrait: Trina Schart Hyman)
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True friends don't come with conditions.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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You want to go back, and so you hold on to the habits you learned while you were traveling, because it's better than admitting the journey's over.
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Seanan McGuire (Every Heart a Doorway (Wayward Children, #1))
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As we count up the memories from one journey, we head off on another. Remembering those who went ahead. Remembering those who will follow after. And someday, we will meet all those people again, out beyond the horizon.
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Hiro Arikawa (The Travelling Cat Chronicles)
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Nothing can be compared to the new life that the discovery of another country provides for a thoughtful person. Although I am still the same I believe to have changed to the bones.
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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Italian Journey)
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You need mountains, long staircases don't make good hikers.
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Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
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I thought that if I owned nothing, had nothing, was nothing, I would have nothing left to lose, and I wouldn't be scared anymore. Because my whole life I’ve been so damn scared. Scared to live because I was scared to die. But at the same I was so scared of living, so I wanted to die. Or maybe so scared of dying that I refused to live. You don't have to be afraid to fall, when you're already on the ground. You don't have to be scared to lose someone, when there's no one around to lose.
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Charlotte Eriksson (Empty Roads & Broken Bottles: in search for The Great Perhaps)
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Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.
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Maya Angelou (Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now)
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The explorer who will not come back or send back his ships to tell his tale is not an explorer, only an adventurer; and his sons are born in exile.
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Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)
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The journey is the destination.
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Dan Eldon
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God always brings someone into your life that has traveled the same path and knows the rocks you climbed to get to the end of the trail.
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Shannon L. Alder
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It is God to whom and with whom we travel, and while He is the end of our journey, He is also at every stopping place.
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Elisabeth Elliot
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Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say It is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
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Naomi Shihab Nye (Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (A Far Corner Book))
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Sensitive people feel so deeply they often have to retreat from the world, in order to dig beneath the layers of pain to find their faith and courage.
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Shannon L. Alder
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Set out from any point. They are all alike. They all lead to a point of departure.
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Antonio Porchia
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From this point forward, you don’t even know how to quit in life.” ~ Aaron Lauritsen, β€˜100 Days Drive
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Aaron Lauritsen
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Traveling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson (Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series)
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The moon and sun are travelers through eternity. Even the years wander on. Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.
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Matsuo Bashō
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Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.
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Aaron Lauritsen (100 Days Drive: The Great North American Road Trip)
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When we fully understand the brevity of life, its fleeting joys and unavoidable pains; when we accept the facts that all men and women are approaching an inevitable doom: the consciousness of it should make us more kindly and considerate of each other. This feeling should make men and women use their best efforts to help their fellow travelers on the road, to make the path brighter and easier as we journey on. It should bring a closer kinship, a better understanding, and a deeper sympathy for the wayfarers who must live a common life and die a common death.
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Clarence Darrow (The Essential Words and Writings of Clarence Darrow (Modern Library Classics))
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The journey not the arrival matters.
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T.S. Eliot
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I keep going back as if Im looking for something I have lost back to the motherland, sisterland, fatherland back to the beacon, the breast the smell and taste of the breeze, and the singing of the rain.
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Heather Nova (The Sorrowjoy)
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I finally felt myself lifted definitively away on the winds of adventure toward worlds I envisaged would be stranger than they were, into situations I imagined would be much more normal than they turned out to be.
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Ernesto Che Guevara (The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey)
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Someday, I would like to go home. The exact location of this place, I don't know, but someday I would like to go. There would be a pleasing feeling of familiarity and a sense of welcome in everything I saw. People would greet me warmly. They would remind me of the length of my absence and the thousands of miles I had travelled in those restless years, but mostly, they would tell me that I had been missed, and that things were better now I had returned. Autumn would come to this place of welcome, this place I would know to be home. Autumn would come and the air would grow cool, dry and magic, as it does that time of the year. At night, I would walk the streets but not feel lonely, for these are the streets of my home town. These are the streets that I had thought about while far away, and now I was back, and all was as it should be. The trees and the falling leaves would welcome me. I would look up at the moon, and remember seeing it in countries all over the world as I had restlessly journeyed for decades, never remembering it looking the same as when viewed from my hometown.
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Henry Rollins
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Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.
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Zeena Schreck
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Genuine love not only respects the individuality of the other but actually cultivates it, even at the risk of separation or loss. The ultimate goal of life remains the spiritual growth of the individual, the solitary journey to peaks that can be climbed only alone.
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
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In Mongolia, when a dog dies, he is buried high in the hills so people cannot walk on his grave. The dog’s master whispers in the dog’s ear his wishes that the dog will return as a man in his next life. Then his tail is cut off and put beneath his head, and a piece of meat of fat is cut off and placed in his mouth to sustain his soul for its journey; before he is reincarnated, the dog’s soul is freed to travel the land, to run across the high desert plains for as long as it would like. I learned that from a program on the National Geographic Channel, so I believe it is true. Not all dogs return as men, they say; only those who are ready. I am ready.
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Garth Stein (The Art of Racing in the Rain)
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When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age.In middle age I was assured greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ships's whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of shod hooves on pavement brings on the ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, once a bum always a bum. I fear this disease incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself....A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we not take a trip; a trip takes us.
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John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
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I really do believe that all of you are at the beginning of a wonderful journey. As you start traveling down that road of life, remember this: There are never enough comfort stops. The places you're going to are never on the map. And once you get that map out, you won't be able to re-fold it no matter how smart you are. So forget the map, roll down the windows, and whenever you can pull over and have picnic with a pig. And if you can help it never fly as cargo.
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Jim Henson
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Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.
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Richard Francis Burton
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In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.
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Anna Quindlen (How Reading Changed My Life)
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The beauty of traveling is understood along the way rather than at the end of the journey, just as the purpose of marriage isn’t about becoming Mr. and Mrs.’s, but is about the love that is expressed on a daily basis between two lovers. A journey is not made up of the destinations that we arrive at, but is composed within every step and each breath we make.
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Forrest Curran
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My story will be over soon. But it’s not something to be sad about. As we count up the memories from one journey, we head off on another. Remembering those who went ahead. Remembering those who will follow after. And someday, we will meet all those people again, out beyond the horizon.
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Hiro Arikawa (The Travelling Cat Chronicles)
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Fare well we call to hearth and hall Though wind may blow and rain may fall We must away ere break of day Over the wood and mountain tall To Rivendell where Elves yet dwell In glades beneath the misty fell Through moor and waste we ride in haste And wither then we cannot tell With foes ahead behind us dread Beneath the sky shall be our bed Until at last our toil be sped Our journey done, our errand sped We must away! We must away! We ride before the break of day!
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J.R.R. Tolkien
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I met Pendragon when I made the journey to the far desert. He is from the tribe known as...as..." Loor was scrambling. Bokka didn't know about the Travelers. I had to bail her out. Yankees," I said. "The Yankees tribe." Hey, what can I say? It was the first thing that came to mind. "It's a strong tribe," I added. "Respected by all...except for our mortal enemies, the Sox tribe. They hate us. Especially the Red ones. Cannibals. Nasty characters.
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D.J. MacHale (The Rivers of Zadaa (Pendragon, #6))
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The only cure to all this madness; is too dream, far and wide, if possibility doesn't knock, create a damn door. If the shoe doesn't fit, don't make it. If the journey your travelling seems to far fetched and wild beyond your imagination; continue on it, great things come to the risk takers. And last but not least, live today; here, right now, you'll thank your future self for it later.
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Nikki Rowe
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Dear Child, Sometimes on your travel through hell, you meet people that think they are in heaven because of their cleverness and ability to get away with things. Travel past them because they don't understand who they have become and never will. These type of people feel justified in revenge and will never learn mercy or forgiveness because they live by comparison. They are the people that don't care about anyone, other than who is making them feel confident. They don’t understand that their deity is not rejoicing with them because of their actions, rather he is trying to free them from their insecurities, by softening their heart. They rather put out your light than find their own. They don't have the ability to see beyond the false sense of happiness they get from destroying others. You know what happiness is and it isn’t this. Don’t see their success as their deliverance. It is a mask of vindication which has no audience, other than their own kind. They have joined countless others that call themselves β€œsurvivors”. They believe that they are entitled to win because life didn’t go as planned for them. You are not like them. You were not meant to stay in hell and follow their belief system. You were bound for greatness. You were born to help them by leading. Rise up and be the light home. You were given the gift to see the truth. They will have an army of people that are like them and you are going to feel alone. However, your family in heaven stands beside you now. They are your strength and as countless as the stars. It is time to let go! Love, Your Guardian Angel
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Shannon L. Alder
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To travel a circle is to journey over the same ground time and time again. To travel a circle wisely is to journey over the same ground for the first time. In this way, the ordinary becomes extraordinary, and the circle, a path to where you wish to be. And when you notice at last that the path has circled back into itself, you realize that where you wish to be is where you have already been ... and always were.
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Neale Donald Walsch
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Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
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John Steinbeck (Travels with Charley: In Search of America)
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Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is in front of our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, new thoughts new places. Introspective reflections which are liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do. At the end of hours of train-dreaming, we may feel we have been returned to ourselves - that is, brought back into contact with emotions and ideas of importance to us. It is not necessarily at home that we best encounter our true selves. The furniture insists that we cannot change because it does not; the domestice setting keeps us tethered to the person we are in ordinary life, but who may not be who we essentially are. If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.
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Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
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The thing about traveling alone, is that you run into your insecurities and fears times ten the normal! You run into all the good things and all the bad things about yourself on a daily basis, and are allowed the opportunity to truly become your own friend. Traveling alone is a learning process; some people travel for leisure, I travel to run into myself!
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C. JoyBell C.
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Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.
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Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
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I tramp the perpetual journey My signs are a rain-proof coat, good shoes, and a staff cut from the woods, No friend of mine takes his ease in my chair, I have no chair, no philosophy, I lead no man to a dinner-table, library, exchange, But each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, My left hand hooking you round the waist, My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road. Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. It is not far, it is within reach, Perhaps you have been on it since you were born and did not know, Perhaps it is everywhere on water and on land. Shoulder your duds dear son, and I will mine, and let us hasten forth, Wonderful cities and free nations we shall fetch as we go. If you tire, give me both burdens, and rest the chuff of your hand on my hip, And in due time you shall repay the same service to me, For after we start we never lie by again. This day before dawn I ascended a hill and look'd at the crowded heaven, And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill'd and satisfied then? And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond. You are also asking me questions and I hear you, I answer that I cannot answer, you must find out for yourself. Sit a while dear son, Here are biscuits to eat and here is milk to drink, But as soon as you sleep and renew yourself in sweet clothes, I kiss you with a good-by kiss and open the gate for your egress hence. Long enough have you dream'd contemptible dreams, Now I wash the gum from your eyes, You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life. Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore, Now I will you to be a bold swimmer, To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.
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Walt Whitman (Song of Myself)
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HOME no one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark you only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well your neighbors running faster than you breath bloody in their throats the boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory is holding a gun bigger than his body you only leave home when home won’t let you stay. no one leaves home unless home chases you fire under feet hot blood in your belly it’s not something you ever thought of doing until the blade burnt threats into your neck and even then you carried the anthem under your breath only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back. you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land no one burns their palms under trains beneath carriages no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled means something more than journey. no one crawls under fences no one wants to be beaten pitied no one chooses refugee camps or strip searches where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer than a city of fire and one prison guard in the night is better than a truckload of men who look like your father no one could take it no one could stomach it no one skin would be tough enough the go home blacks refugees dirty immigrants asylum seekers sucking our country dry niggers with their hands out they smell strange savage messed up their country and now they want to mess ours up how do the words the dirty looks roll off your backs maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble than bone than your child body in pieces. i want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark home is the barrel of the gun and no one would leave home unless home chased you to the shore unless home told you to quicken your legs leave your clothes behind crawl through the desert wade through the oceans drown save be hunger beg forget pride your survival is more important no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i dont know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here
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Warsan Shire