Hoyt & Roberts, comps. Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations. 1922.
Traveling
The traveled mind is the catholic mind educated from exclusiveness and egotism.
Amos Bronson Alcott—Table-Talk. Traveling.
Traveling is no fool’s errand to him who carries his eyes and itinerary along with him.
Amos Bronson Alcott—Table-Talk. Traveling.
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education; in the elder, a part of experience. He that travelleth into a country before he hath some entrance into the language, goeth to school, and not to travel.
Bacon—Of Travel.
Go far—too far you cannot, still the farther
The more experience finds you: And go sparing;—
One meal a week will serve you, and one suit,
Through all your travels; for you’ll find it certain,
The poorer and the baser you appear,
The more you look through still.
Beaumont and Fletcher—The Woman’s Prize. Act IV. Sc. 5. L. 199.
I depart,
Whither I know not; but the hour’s gone by
When Albion’s lessening shores could grieve or glad mine eye.
Byron—Childe Harold. Canto III. St. 1.
He travels safest in the dark night who travels lightest.
Fernando Cortez. See Prescott—Conquest of Mexico. Bk. V. Ch. III.
In travelling
I shape myself betimes to idleness
And take fools’ pleasure.
George Eliot—The Spanish Gypsy. Bk. I.
I have been a stranger in a strange land.
Exodus. II. 22.
Know most of the rooms of thy native country before thou goest over the threshold thereof.
Fuller—The Holy and Profane States. Of Travelling. Maxim IV.
Un viaggiatore prudente non disprezza mai il suo paese.
A wise traveler never despises his own country.
Goldoni—Pamela. I. 16.
One who journeying
Along a way he knows not, having crossed
A place of drear extent, before him sees
A river rushing swiftly toward the deep,
And all its tossing current white with foam,
And stops and turns, and measures back his way.
Homer—Iliad. Bk. V. L. 749. Bryant’s trans.
Cœlum, non animum mutant, qui trans mare currunt.
Strenua nos exercet inertia, navibus atque
Quadrigis petimus bene vivere; quod petis hic est.
They change their sky, not their mind, who cross the sea. A busy idleness possesses us: we seek a happy life, with ships and carriages: the object of our search is present with us.
Horace—Epistles. I. 11. 27.
I am fevered with the sunset,
I am fretful with the bay,
For the wander-thirst is on me
And my soul is in Cathay.
Richard Hovey—A Sea Gypsy.
The wonders of each region view,
From frozen Lapland to Peru.
Soame Jenkyns—Epistle to Lord Lovelace. Suggested Johnson’s lines.
Let him go abroad to a distant country; let him go to some place where he is not known. Don’t let him go to the devil where he is known.
Samuel Johnson—Boswell’s Life of Johnson. (1773).
As the Spanish proverb says, “He who would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.” So it is in travelling: a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.
Samuel Johnson—Boswell’s Life of Johnson. (1778).
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—Piozzi’s Johnsoniana. 154.
Let observation with extensive view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife,
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life.
Samuel Johnson—Vanity of Human Wishes.
Follow the Romany Patteran
Sheer to the Austral light,
Where the bosom of God is the wild west wind,
Sweeping the sea floors white.
Kipling—The Gypsy Trail.
Down to Gehenna or up to the throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.
Kipling—The Winners.
The marquise has a disagreeable day for her journey.
Louis XV.—While Looking at Mme. de Pompadour’s Funeral.
Better sit still where born, I say,
Wed one sweet woman and love her well,
Love and be loved in the old East way,
Drink sweet waters, and dream in a spell,
Than to wander in search of the Blessed Isles,
And to sail the thousands of watery miles
In search of love, and find you at last
On the edge of the world, and a curs’d outcast.
Joaquin Miller—Pace Implora.
We sack, we ransack to the utmost sands
Of native kingdoms, and of foreign lands:
We travel sea and soil; we pry, and prowl,
We progress, and we prog from pole to pole.
Quarles—Divine Emblems. Bk. II. II.
Qui veut voyager loin ménage sa monture.
He who will travel far spares his steed.
Racine—Plaideurs. I. 1.
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
Christina Rossetti—Up-Hill.
Zählt der Pilger Meilen,
Wenn er zum fernen Gnadenbilde wallt?
Does the pilgrim count the miles
When he travels to some distant shrine?
Schiller—Wallenstein’s Tod. IV. 11.
Nusquam est, qui ubique est.
He who is everywhere is nowhere.
Seneca—Epistolæ Ad Lucilium. II.
When I was at home, I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.
As You Like It. Act II. Sc. 4. L. 17.
And in his brain,
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit
After a voyage, he hath strange places cramm’d
With observation, the which he vents
In mangled forms.
As You Like It. Act II. Sc. 7. L. 38.
***The sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.
As You Like It. Act IV. Sc. 1. L. 17.
Farewell, Monsieur Traveller: look you lisp and wear strange suits, disable all the benefits of your own country.
As You Like It. Act IV. Sc. 1. L. 33.
Travell’d gallants,
That fill the court with quarrels, talk, and tailors.
Henry VIII. Act I. Sc. 3. L. 19.
I spake of most disastr’us chances,
****
Of being taken by the insolent foe
And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence
And portance in my travellers’ history;
Wherein of antres vast, and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak—such was the process;—
And of the cannibals that each other eat.
Othello. Act I. Sc. 3. L. 134.
I think it was Jekyll who used to say that the further he went west, the more convinced he felt that the wise men came from the east.
Sydney Smith—Lady Holland’s Memoir. Vol. I.
’Tis nothing when a fancied scene’s in view
To skip from Covent Garden to Peru.
Steele—Prologue to Ambrose Phillip’s Distressed Mother.
I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba and cry, “’Tis all barren!”
Sterne—Sentimental Journey. In the Street. Calais.
When we have discovered a continent, or crossed a chain of mountains, it is only to find another ocean or another plain upon the further side…. O toiling hands of mortals! O wearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.
Stevenson—El Dorado.
I always love to begin a journey on Sundays, because I shall have the prayers of the church to preserve all that travel by land or by water.
Swift—Polite Conversation. Dialogue II.
’Tis a mad world (my masters) and in sadnes
I travail’d madly in these dayes of madnes.
John Taylor—Wandering to see the Wonders of the West.
Let observation with extended observation observe extensively.
Tennyson, paraphrasing Johnson. See Locker-Lampson’s Recollections of a tour with Tennyson, in Memoirs of Tennyson by his son. II. 73. See also Criticism by Byron in his Diary, Jan. 9, 1821. “Let observation with observant view, / Observe mankind from China to Peru.” Goldsmith’s paraphrase. Caroline Spurgeon—Works of Dr. Johnson. (1898). De Quincey quotes it from some writer, according to Dr. Birkbeck Hill—Boswell. I. 194. Coleridge quotes it, Lecture VI, on Shakespeare and Milton.
For always roaming with a hungry heart,
Much have I seen and known.
Tennyson—Ulysses.
Good company in a journey makes the way to seem the shorter.
Izaak Walton—The Compleat Angler. Pt. I. Ch. I.
All human race from China to Peru,
Pleasure, howe’er disguis’d by art, pursue.
Thomas Warton—The Universal Love of Pleasure.
The dust is old upon my “sandal-shoon,”
And still I am a pilgrim; I have roved
From wild America to Bosphor’s waters,
And worshipp’d at innumerable shrines
Of beauty; and the painter’s art, to me,
And sculpture, speak as with a living tongue,
And of dead kingdoms, I recall the soul,
Sitting amid their ruins.
N. P. Willis—Florence Gray. L. 46.