The Tao of Travel Quotes

“The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk the unknown..”
― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

“I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about.”
― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

“Travel holds the magical possibility of reinvention: that you might find a place you love, to begin a new life and never go home.”
― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

“A train journey is travel; everything else—planes especially—is transfer, your journey beginning when the plane lands.—GRB”
― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

“Spanish word sendereando, for hiking, is compact and pretty (sendero is path), but the wisest phrase for this activity is the Latin solvitur ambulando (“it is solved by walking”), attributed to Saint Augustine. The phrase was mentioned by the long-distance walker Patrick Leigh-Fermor to Bruce Chatwin. “Hearing it, immediately Bruce whipped out his notebook,” Chatwin’s biographer wrote. Walking to ease the mind is also an objective of the pilgrim. There is a spiritual dimension too: the walk itself is part of a process of purification. Walking is the age-old form of travel, the most fundamental, perhaps the most revealing.”
― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

“I read about elsewheres, fantasizing about my freedom.”
― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road

“A river is an appropriate frontier. Water is neutral and in its impartial winding makes the national boundary look like an act of God.—OPE”
― Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel: Enlightenments from Lives on the Road