Leaving home in a sense involves a kind of second birth in which we give birth to ourselves.

- Robert Neelly Bellah

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

- Laozi (Lao Tzu, Lao Tse, Lao Tsu)

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

- Mark Twain

We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can “show off” and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off. All our passengers are paying strict attention to this thing, with the end in view which I have mentioned. The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass.

- Mark Twain

You may wonder, 'How can I leave it all behind if I am just coming back to it? How can I make a new beginning if I simply return to the old?' The answer lies in the return. You will not come back to the 'same old thing.' What you return to has changed because you have changed. Your perceptions will be altered. You will not incorporate into the same body, status, or world you left behind. The river has been flowing while you were gone. Now it does not look like the same river. [The Book of the Vision Quest]

- Steven Foster

As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.

- Margaret Mead

Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty -- his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

- Aldous Huxley

To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to become an asker of questions.

- Sam Keen

Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.

- Mark Twain

Whenever I prepare for a journey I prepare as though for death. Should I never return, all is in order.

- Katherine Mansfield

I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost

A person needs at intervals to separate from family and companions and go to new places. One must go without familiars in order to be open to influences, to change.

- Katharine Butler Hathaway

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.

- Robert Louis Stevenson