Rolf Potts > Quotes

“Vagabonding—n. (1) The act of leaving behind the orderly world to travel independently for an extended period of time. (2) A privately meaningful manner of travel that emphasizes creativity, adventure, awareness, simplicity, discovery, independence, realism, self-reliance, and the growth of the spirit. (3) A deliberate way of living that makes freedom to travel possible.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Before the development of tourism, travel was conceived to be like study, and its fruits were considered to be the adornment of the mind and the formation of the judgement. The traveler was a student of what he sought. —PAUL FUSSELL, ABROAD”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“through simplicity—Thoreau was able to find true wealth. “Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only,” he wrote. “Money is not required to buy one necessity of the soul.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“always challenge yourself to try new things and keep learning.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Indeed, the surest way to miss out on the genuine experience of a foreign place—the psychic equivalent of trapping yourself back at home—is to obsessively check your e-mail and social media feeds as you travel from place to place.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing. —WALT WHITMAN, “SONG OF THE OPEN ROAD”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes… all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating.—PHIL COUSINEAU, THE ART OF PILGRIMAGE”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“How else do we begin to know the world?” In this way, vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal—not a quest for answers so much as a celebration of the questions, an embrace of the ambiguous, and an openness to anything that comes your way.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“He saw that if anyone appeared insane it was not the island cannibals or the grease-encrusted Aleuts or the stony-hearted Tartars, but the one who visited them. He saw that the true alien was the traveler. —LARZER ZIFF, RETURN PASSAGES Shortly”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Vagabonding is about gaining the courage to loosen your grip on the so-called certainties of this world. Vagabonding is about refusing to exile travel to some other, seemingly more appropriate, time of your life. Vagabonding is about taking control of your circumstances instead of passively waiting for them to decide your fate.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“What made travel possible was that he knew how neither self nor wealth can be measured in terms of what you consume or own. Even the downtrodden souls on the fringes of society, he observed, had something the rich didn’t: time. This notion—the notion that “riches” don’t necessarily make you wealthy—is as old as society itself. The ancient Hindu Upanishads refer disdainfully to “that chain of possessions wherewith men bind themselves, and beneath which they sink”; ancient Hebrew scriptures declare that “whoever loves money never has money enough.” Jesus noted that it’s pointless for a man to “gain the whole world, yet lose his very self,” and the Buddha whimsically pointed out that seeking happiness in one’s material desires is as absurd as “suffering because a banana tree will not bear mangoes.”
― 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 forget that there’s a difference between the two. Thus, having convinced ourselves that buying things is the only way to play an active role in the world, we fatalistically conclude that we’ll never be rich enough to purchase a long-term travel experience.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“As Dean MacCannell pointed out, “Anything that is remarked, even little flowers or leaves picked up off the ground and shown to a child, even a shoeshine or gravel pit, anything is potentially an attraction….Sometimes we have official guides and travelogues to assist us in this point. Usually we are on our own. How else do we know another person except as an ensemble of suggestions hollowed out from the universe of possible suggestions? How else do we begin to know the world?”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Explore your own higher latitudes,” wrote Thoreau in Walden. “Be a Columbus to whole new continents within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis. —EDWARD ABBEY, DESERT SOLITAIRE”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“We need sometimes to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment no matter what. —GEORGE SANTAYANA, “THE PHILOSOPHY OF TRAVEL”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“My greatest skill has been to want little. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Certain activities—sleeping, eating, reading, socializing, wandering—will become a fixture of each day. This is good and well (routines make your day more efficient, after all), but you should be careful not to let your days or destinations blur together. Once this begins to happen—once you feel yourself getting jaded to the long haul—it’s time to mix your travels up a bit.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Happiness, he realized, is not a product to be acquired and fine-tuned; it is a by-product of a life that is being lived in a fully engaged way.”
― Rolf Potts, The Vagabond's Way: 366 Meditations on Wanderlust, Discovery, and the Art of Travel

“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. 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

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilization, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints. —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON, TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY IN THE CÉVENNES”
― 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.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Interestingly, one of the initial impediments to open-mindedness is not ignorance but ideology.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Traveling hopefully into the unknown with a little information: dead reckoning is the way most people live their lives, and the phrase itself seems to sum up human existence. —PAUL THEROUX, FRESH AIR FIEND”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“Thus, having convinced ourselves that buying things is the only way to play an active role in the world, we fatalistically conclude that we’ll never be rich enough to purchase a long-term travel experience.”
― Rolf Potts, Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

“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