Vacation, Travel, Baggage & Packing Quotes

Sure, it is safer and cheaper to stay home...probably. But God made the whole world and you've only seen a little bit of it. I'll bet there are even places in your own local area that you've wondered about or have meant to see but haven't quite gotten to yet. You are not a cog in a wheel - you have a soul, and dreams, and curiosity. Let these quotes inspire you to take a little time and get out there!

>>> Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there's nothing else to gaze on,

Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore,

Big mountains heaved to heaven, which the blinding sunsets blazon,

Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?

Have you swept the visioned valley with the green stream streaking

through it,

Searched the Vastness for a something you have lost?

Have you strung your soul to silence? Then for God's sake go and do it;

Hear the challenge, learn the lesson, pay the cost. - Jack London, in The Call of the Wild:

>>> "When I was very young and the urge to be someplace 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 that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. ... In other words, I don't improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable." -- John Steinbeck

>>> "A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it." -- John Steinbeck

>>> "The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page." -- St. Augustine

>>> "Travelling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it." -Cesare Pavese

>>> "Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think." -- Lawrence Durrell

>>> "I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them." -- Mark Twain

>>> "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes."

- Marcel Proust

>>> "Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this taken away, 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

>>> "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails.

Explore. Dream. Discover."

- Mark Twain

>>> "If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears."

- Glenn Clark

>>> "Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent."

- Margot Fonteyn

>>> ". . .travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living."

- Miriam Beard

>>> "Those who visit foreign nations, but associate only with their own country-men, change their climate, but not their customs. They see new meridians, but the same men; and with heads as empty as their pockets, return home with traveled bodies, but untravelled minds."

- Caleb Colton

>>> "There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign."

- Robert Louis Stevenson

>>> "If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home."

- James A. Michener

>>> "The journey not the arrival matters."

- T.S. Eliot

>>> "One of the gladdest moments of 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 home, man feels once more happy."

- Sir Richard Burton

>>> "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;

Breath's aware that will not keep.

Up, lad: when the journey's over there'll be time enough to sleep."

- A.E. Housman 1859-1936: A Shropshire Lad

>>> "It is no coincidence that in no known language does the phrase 'as pretty as an airport' exist."

- Douglas Adams, "Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul"

>>> The only aspect of our travels that is interesting to others is disaster. - Martha Gellman

>>> "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." - Bilbo Baggins

>>> The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. --Marcel Proust

>>> Life is a journey -- not a guided tour.

>>> When your mind travels does it prefer window or aisle?

>>> When most people travel, they forget to pack their clues, and often leave their common sense behind at rest stops.

>>> "One enjoyment was certain -- that of suitableness as companions; a suitableness which comprehended health and temper to bear inconveniences -- cheerfulness to enhance every pleasure -- and affection and intelligence, which might supply it among themselves if there were disappointments abroad." - from Pride & Prejudice

>>> "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindness..."

Mark Twain

>>> "Unchecked, the tourist will climb over the fence and come right into your house to take pictures of you in your habitat. Cities mindful of tourists have built elaborate "tourist traps" which, luckily, work. Tourists are kept confined to these, and few escape. There is, of course, the type known as the "intrepid tourist." This one has to be watched carefully or he can become most annoying. Little wonder these are so often the target of terrorists. If there is an aspect of benign terror about the tourist, there is also a great deal of tourist in the terrorist. Terrorists travel with only one thing in mind, just like the tourist, and the specifics of places escape them both. Terrorists travel for the purpose of shooting unsuspecting foreigners, just as tourists travel for the purpose of shooting them with a camera."

>>> I don't know if this is true but here is a quote that will make you feel really good about your budget travelling ways: "...luxury is the enemy of observation, a costly indulgence that induces such a good feeling that you notice nothing. Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seems as though they are from another planet" --Paul Theroux in "Ghost Train to the Eastern Star".

>>> Half the fun of the travel is the esthetic of lostness. ---Ray Bradbury

>>>The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land. ---G.K. Chesterton

>>>We are all travellers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend. ---Robert Louis Stevenson

>>>The wonders of a journey consist far more of such intangible experiences and unexpected situations than of factual things and events of material reality. --- Lama Anagarika Govinda - The Way of the White Clouds

>>>The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands. The blood flows with the fast circulation of childhood.--- ~ Sir Richard Burton - African Explorer

>>>A vacation is not a matter of place or time. We can take a wonderful vacation in spirit, even though we are obliged to stay home, if we will only drop our burdens from our minds for awhile. But no amount of travel will give us rest and recreation if we carry our work and worries with us. ~ Laura Ingalls Wilder

Do the airlines charge for emotional baggage?

>>> “Excess baggage is a symptom of something we are missing on the inside – a fear that we won’t be accepted for what we are, as if our selves are not enough. We bring too much of our past experience, the clutter of our emotions. These things get in the way and keep us from getting close to others. Then we are left w/ the task of having to find someone else to carry it, whether it is our luggage or our loneliness.” - Mary Morris

>>> "He who would travel happily must travel light." -St.Exupery

>>> "On a long journey even a straw weighs heavy."

- Spanish proverb

>>> "I travel light; as light, that is, as a man can travel who will still carry his body around because of its sentimental value."

- Christopher Fry (b.1970) British playwright

>>> "Is there anything as horrible as starting on a trip? Once you're off, that's all right, but the last moments are earthquake and convulsion, and the feeling that you are a snail being pulled off your rock." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Tell us about the most amazing place you've ever been. Or tell us about that special place you're hoping to see before you die.