Rolf Potts > Quotes

“Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the moon find thee by other lakes, and the night overtake thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“However, a lot of media information—especially day-to-day news—should be approached with a healthy amount of skepticism. This is because so many media outlets (especially television, magazines, and the Internet) are more in the business of competing for your attention than giving you a balanced picture of the world.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“from”
― Rolf Potts, The Vagabond's Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel

“Leaving home is a kind of forgiveness, and when you get among strangers, you’re amazed at how decent they seem. Nobody smirks at you or gossips about you, nobody resents your successes or relishes your defeats. You get to start over, a sort of redemption. —GARRISON KEILLOR, LEAVING HOME”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“had it not turned into a misadventure I might never haver written about it”
― Rolf Potts, Marco Polo Didn't Go There: Stories and Revelations from One Decade as a Postmodern Travel Writer

“And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again—to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“It's just that too much of any good thing has a way of wearing a man down”
― Rolf Potts

“Listen: we are here on earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different! —KURT VONNEGUT, TIMEQUAKE”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“In many ways, this transition into travel can be compared to childhood: Everything you see is new and emotionally affecting, basic tasks like eating and sleeping take on a heightened significance, and entertainment can be found in the simplest curiosities and novelties. “Suddenly you are five years old again,” Bill Bryson observed in Neither Here nor There. “You can’t read anything, you only have 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.” In a certain sense, walking through new places with the instincts of a five-year-old is liberating. No longer are you bound to your past. In living so far away from your home, you’ll suddenly find yourself holding a clean slate. There’s no better opportunity to break old habits, face latent fears, and test out repressed facets of your personality. Socially, you’ll find it easier to be gregarious and open-minded. Mentally, you’ll feel engaged and optimistic, newly ready to listen and learn. And, as much as anything, you’ll find yourself abuzz with the peculiar feeling that you can choose to go in any direction (literally and figuratively) at any given moment.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of your food, your closet full of your clothes, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That’s not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating. —MICHAEL CRICHTON, TRAVELS”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The goal of preparation, then, is not knowing exactly where you’ll go but being confident nonetheless that you’ll get there. This means that your attitude will be more important than your itinerary, and that the simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“In this way, “seeing” as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Most of us, of course, have never taken such vows—but we choose to live like monks anyway, rooting ourselves to a home or a career and using the future as a kind of phony ritual that justifies the present. In this way, we end up spending (as Thoreau put it) “the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it.” We’d love to drop all and explore the world outside, we tell ourselves, but the time never seems right. Thus, given an unlimited amount of choices, we make none. Settling into our lives, we get so obsessed with holding on to our domestic certainties that we forget why we desired them in the first place.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics—age, ideology, income—and everything to do with personal outlook. Long-term travel isn’t about being a college student; it’s about being a student of daily life. Long-term travel isn’t an act of rebellion against society; it’s an act of common sense within society. Long-term travel doesn’t require a massive “bundle of cash”; it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“We do not need to understand other people and their customs fully to interact with them and learn in the process; it is making the effort to interact without knowing all the rules, improvising certain situations, that allows us to grow. —MARY CATHERINE BATESON, PERIPHERAL VISIONS”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“When we pack too well, we are telling the world that it isn’t good enough on its own, that it makes us uncomfortable and scared. We don’t know if we can depend on anything or anyone, and we’ve decided it’s better not to take the chance. —Stefany Anne Goldberg, “You Can Take It with You” (2012)”
― Rolf Potts, The Vagabond's Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel

“paradise” is defined in contrast to the stresses of home. Take away those stresses for a couple of months, and it’s hard to wring much passion or esteem from hanging out on a beach and not doing much.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“On a basic level, there are three general methods to simplifying your life: stopping expansion, reining in your routine, and reducing clutter.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“As you simplify your life and look forward to spending your new wealth of time, you’re likely to get a curious reaction from your friends and family. On one level, they will express enthusiasm for your impending adventures. But on another level, they might take your growing freedom as a subtle criticism of their own way of life. Because your fresh worldview might appear to call their own values into question (or, at least, force them to consider those values in a new light), they will tend to write you off as irresponsible and self-indulgent. Let them. As I’ve said before, vagabonding is not an ideology, a balm for societal ills, or a token of social status. Vagabonding is, was, and always will be a private undertaking—and its goal is to improve your life not in relation to your neighbors but in relation to yourself. Thus, if your neighbors consider your travels foolish, don’t waste your time trying to convince them otherwise. Instead, the only sensible reply is to quietly enrich your life with the myriad opportunities that vagabonding provides.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“specific expectations? The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Rather, it is a warning to avoid turning inspiration into fetish and tradition into dogma; it is an admonition to never reduce the spiritual realm to the narrow borders of your own perceptions, prejudices, and ideals.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Over the years, family and friends have said to me, “I’m living vicariously through you.” Don’t ever live vicariously. This is your life. Live. —LAVINIA SPALDING, 43, WRITER AND TEACHER, SAN FRANCISCO”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“As John Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, “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…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.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Most people are on the world, not in it—having no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate. —JOHN MUIR, THE WILDERNESS WORLD OF JOHN MUIR”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“In reality, long-term travel has nothing to do with demographics- age, ideology, income- and everything to do with personal outlook. Long-term travel isn't about being a college student, it's about being a student of daily life. Long-term travel isn't an act of rebellion against society; it's an act of common sense within society. Long-term travel doesn't require a massive "bundle of cash", it requires only that we walk through the world in a more deliberate way.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“We see as we are,” said the Buddha,”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“neither self nor wealth can be measured in terms of what you consume or own. Even”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“This notion—that material investment is somehow more important to life than personal investment—is exactly what leads so many of us to believe we could never afford to go vagabonding. The more our life options get paraded around as consumer options, the more we”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Powerful men do not necessarily make the most eminent travelers; it is rather those who take the most interest in their work that succeed the best; as a huntsman says, “It is the nose that gives speed to the hound.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel