Dan

“Of all the intoxicants you can find on the road (including a "national beer" for nearly every country in the world), marijuana deserves a particular mention here, primarily because it's so popular with travelers. Much of this popularity is due to the fact that marijuana is a relatively harmless diversion (again, provided you don't get caught with it) that can intensify certain impressions and sensations of travel. The problem with marijuana, however, is that it's the travel equivalent of watching television: It replaces real sensations with artificially enhanced ones. Because it doesn't force you to work for a feeling, it creates passive experiences that are only vaguely connected to the rest of your life. "The drug vision remains a sort of dream that cannot be brought over into daily life," wrote Peter Matthiessen in The Snow Leopard. "Old mists may be banished, that is true, but the alien chemical agent forms another mist, maintaining the separation of the 'I' from the true experience of the 'One.'" Moreover, chemical highs have a way of distracting you from the utterly stoning natural high of travel itself. After all, roasting a bowl might spice up a random afternoon in Dayton, Ohio, but is it really all that necessary along the Sumatran shores of Lake Toba, the mountain basins of Nepal, or the desert plateaus of Patagonia? As Salvador Dali quipped, "I never took drugs because I am drugs." With this in mind, strive to be drugs as you travel, to patiently embrace the raw, personal sensation of unmediated reality--an experience for more affecting than any intoxicant can promise.”
― Rolf Potts

“As you get past the first few weeks of your travel experience however, you’ll discover that partying on the road is different from partying at home. At home, partying is a way of celebrating the weekend or taking a pause from the workaday world. On the road, every moment is a weekend, every day a break from the workaday world. Thus, falling into a nightly ritual of partying - as can easily happen in traveler hangouts anywhere on the planet - is a sure way to overlook the subtlety of places, stunt your creativity, and trap yourself in the patterns of home. Granted, you can have plenty of fun in the process; but if you travel the world merely to indulge in the same kinds of diversions you enjoy at home, you’ll end up selling your experience short.”
― Rolf Potts

“If you're disciplining yourself to constantly be at the intersection of many divergent streams of intellectual influence, it's like creating a check and balance set of forces for yourself. You don't need to make independence of thought an act of willpower. You don't need to be like a Marcus Aurelius sort of strong willed high virtue type of person in order to have an independent mind; you have an independent mind my listening to many different people constantly.”
― Venkatesh Rao

“Who gave you the right to say all this?"

"You did."

"Well, go on."

"Do you wish the rest?"

"Go on."

"I think it hurts you to know that you've made me suffer. You wish you hadn't. And yet there's something that frightens you more. The knowledge that I haven't suffered at all."

"Go on."

"The knowledge that I'm neither kind nor generous now, but simply indifferent. It frightens you, because you know that things like the Stoddard Temple always require payment--and you see that I'm not paying for it. You were astonished that I accepted this commission. Do you think my acceptance required courage? You needed far greater courage to hire me. You see, this is what I think of the Stoddard Temple. I'm through with it. You're not.”
― Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead