Favourite Travel Quotes

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Mar 5th, 2003, 11:12 AM

Kavey

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Favourite Travel Quotes

Over on the Europe board there is a thread where people are posting their favourite travel quotes and I thought maybe we could share ours here too. Here are just a few of my favourite generic travel quotes. I'll add some Africa specific ones afterwards. Please share your favourite passages about travel and/ or Africa. Kavey "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that 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 "Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends." Maya Angelou "When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable." Clifton Paul Fadiman "Certainly, 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." Charles Caleb Colton "As with most things in life, what you get out of a trip is equal only to what you put into it. Learning about a place is part of the excitement of travel. Without prior preparation your experience is diminished because you miss the significance of what you are seeing and doing." Barrie Kerper "Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you've never been to, perhaps more homesick than for familiar ground." Judith Thurman, The Hand of Distance "What you've done becomes the judge of what you're going to do -- especially in other people's minds. When you're traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don't have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road." William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways "The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know." Loren Eiseley "The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are." Samuel Johnson

Mar 5th, 2003, 11:16 AM

Kavey

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Here are some Africa ones: “Everything in Africa bites, but the safari bug is worst of all.” Brian Jackman “For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.” Maya Angelou “I dream of an Africa which is in peace with itself.” Nelson Mandela “The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth.” Mary McLeod Bethune “The darkest thing about Africa has always been our ignorance of it.” George Kimble “I dream of the realization of the unity of Africa, whereby its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent. I dream of our vast deserts, of our forests, of all our great wildernesses.” Nelson Mandela “In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.” Charles Lindbergh “I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.” D. H. Lawrence “Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.” James Anthony Froude "[Botswana] was one intricate labyrinth of swamp, with many small streams moving outward from the river into the sandy wastes of the southwest. Where all this water goes is a mystery." Aurel Schultz There is always something new out of Africa. Pliny the Elder (23 AD - 79 AD) Africa? A book one thumbs Listlessly, till slumber comes. Countee Cullen What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang? Countee Cullen Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars. Jean Genet

Mar 5th, 2003, 11:20 AM

Kavey

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And this one, sent to me by one of the friends i have made here on Fodors: "I believe there is no sickness of the heart too great it cannot be cured by a dose of Africa. Families must go there to learn why they belong together on this earth, adolescents to discover humility, lovers to plumb old but untried wells of passion, honeymooners to seal marriages with a shared sense of bafflement, those shopworn with life to find a tonic for futility, the aged to recognize a symmetry to twilight. I know this all sounds a bit much, but if I have ever seen magic, it has been in Africa." John Heminway, African Journeys

Mar 6th, 2003, 12:48 AM

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I have loads may post them later... but my favourite is.... "If the road you travel has no obstacles... it leads nowhere"

Mar 11th, 2003, 07:11 AM

Kavey

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Does anybody have any more? I know I was probably pretty thorough but I KNOW there are a lot more out there as I have them in a Word file at home!!!

Mar 11th, 2003, 09:54 AM

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Kavey here's some of my favourite general travel ones... some of them I don't know who to credit to.. "The world is a great big book, of which those who never travel read only one page." (Augustine) "There are no maps to where no one has gone before." -Kodak ad "A sheet of sandpaper makes a cheap and effective substitute for costly maps when visiting the Sahara desert." "I don't mind going nowhere as long as it's an interesting path." "Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time." -Stephen Wright "If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there." "A traveller without knowledge is like a bird without wings" (Mushariff-Ud-Din, 1184-1291) "Setting out well is a quarter of the journey." "It isn't the mountains ahead that wear you out, it's the grain of sand in your shoe." He who travels, enriches his life" Proverb from the High Atlas "There is always something new coming out of Africa" Gaius Plinius Secudus, known as Pliny the Elder (23 - 79 A.D.)" "Tourism is not just business, it is also creating friendship among people" "You must travel over a rough road to reach the stars." "Keeping to the main road is easy, but people love to be sidetracked." - Lao Tzu (6th cent BC) "Turn the obstacles on your pathinto stepping stones" "If we could have everything that lay along our path in advance, we might never set out on our journey" "Walk too fast or be too impatientand you will miss much" "A hopeful heart and an open mindare the best travelling companions" "Somewhere on your journeydon't forget to turn aroundand enjoy the view"

Mar 11th, 2003, 01:28 PM

Kavey

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Fantastic and there are a few there that I haven't got on my very very long list! (The one I have at home not the one above). THANK YOU! Anyone else?

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Mar 13th, 2003, 10:42 AM

RnRvR

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Yes, one we often heard as well as repeated, especially in the dead of night: "Jeeeez, what was that?" Possibly E. A. Poe ... ?

Mar 14th, 2003, 04:45 AM

hanl

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How about this one (probably my least favourite quote, actually) "What's that? A hyena? Bah. Looks like a dog. We have bigger dogs than that in Paris." - French tourist on game drive in same vehicle as yours truly, who could have throttled him.

Mar 14th, 2003, 08:28 AM

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Kavey

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LOLOL Here's another: "Far away places with strange-soundin' names Far away over the sea Those far away places with the strange-soundin' names Are callin', callin' me They call me a dreamer, well maybe I am But I know that I'm burnin' to see Those far away places with the strange-soundin' names Are callin', callin' me." Alex C. Cramer & Joan Whitney

Mar 14th, 2003, 08:52 AM

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Kavey

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"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?" Isak Dinesen/ Karen Blixen

Mar 22nd, 2003, 01:34 PM

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dianeg

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Hanl helped me remember this one from my own then-12-year-old son, while we spent an afternoon observing animals coming to a waterhole in Zimbabwe's Hwange National Park: “We get better close-ups on TV.”

Mar 25th, 2003, 05:12 AM

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mariacallas

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Kavey, thank you for the quote from Karen Blixen; what an amazing way she had with words. I've been studying the posts here for a while. I'm planning a trip to Africa. I'm still not sure exactly when or where. I've been making inquiries at the camps. It's starting to look like this summer or the next. I had originally wanted to go at Christmas but I'm starting to think maybe that isn't such a good time. Thank you all for your inspiration.

Mar 25th, 2003, 06:05 AM

#14

Kavey

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Maria Ask lots of questions - start new threads for your own questions so your questions don't get lost at the bottom of older threads... Many of us would be more than happy to help you - we're not experts - not most of us anyway - just enthusiasts who have caught the Africa bug and are certainly not looking for a cure. <BR