Tao Te Ching

The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words
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Travel

Western culture idealizes the idea of travel; hope, work hard, and lavish resources on the opportunity. But what are we really looking for? How likely are we to find it by simply going to a different physical location? And if we're running away from something, how likely it won't at least psychologically still be there when we arrive somewhere else? Pleasure seeking, entertainment infatuation, and the myriad styles of escapism frequently inspire our desire to travel. Often what we’re genuinely trying to find is where we started, always close at hand rather than occupying some distant location. And as Lao Tzu noticed, “the further we go, the less we know.” Contrarily though, travel can reflect into an open mind a new and more authentic perspective. It can extricate our habitual patterns, cultural prejudices, and arrogant certainties from their solidified narrowness.

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Quotes (116)

“The journey is the thing.”

Homer 1
Primogenitor of Western culture

Themes: Travel

81. Journey Without Goal

“I have sung storms to sleep. I have made the clashing rocks move away from our ship. I have been to the end of the world and seen things more terrible, more beautiful than I thought could be.”

O​rpheus /ˈɔːrfiəs 1
"Greatest poet and musician of all time"

Themes: Travel

“He that is discontented in one place will seldom be happy in another.”

Aesop 620 – 546 BCE
Hero of the oppressed and downtrodden
from Aesop's Fables, the Aesopica

Themes: Travel

80. A Golden Age

“Mindful of death and appreciating where they are,
They have no need for long journeys.”

Lao Tzu 老子 1 via Shan Dao, chapter #80
(Lǎozǐ)
from Tao Te Ching 道德经 Dàodéjīng

Themes: Travel

“Without leaving home you can understand all that goes on in the world.”

Lao Tzu 老子 1 via Shan Dao
(Lǎozǐ)
from Tao Te Ching 道德经 Dàodéjīng

Themes: Travel

“The farther you go, the less you know.”

Lao Tzu 老子 1 via Shan Dao
(Lǎozǐ)
from Tao Te Ching 道德经 Dàodéjīng

Themes: Travel Technology

“Go ye, O Bhikkus, and wander forth for the benefit of the many, for the welfare of the many, out of compassion for worldly beings, for the benefit, good, and happiness of men and gods.”

Buddha गौतम बुद्ध 563 – 483 BCE
(Siddhartha Shakyamuni Gautama)
Awakened Truth

Themes: Travel

“It is better to travel, than to arrive.”

Buddha गौतम बुद्ध 563 – 483 BCE
(Siddhartha Shakyamuni Gautama)
Awakened Truth

Themes: Travel

81. Journey Without Goal

“Roads were made for journeys not destinations.”

Confucius 孔丘 551 – 479 BCE
(Kongzi, Kǒng Zǐ)
History's most influential "failure"

Themes: Travel

45. Complete Perfection

“The Great Way is level and not far from oneself. Those who seek it afar go and then return.”

Wenzi 文子 1 via Thomas Cleary
(Wénzǐ)
"Authentic Presence of Pervading Mystery.”
from The Wenzi, Wénzǐ 文子

Themes: Travel

“Into the same river no man can step twice; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.”

Heraclitus Ἡράκλειτος 535 – 475 BCE
(of Ephesus, the "Weeping Philosopher")
A Greek Buddha

“Dear to a man is his own home city, his comrades and kinsmen. But to foolish men belongs only a love for things afar.”

Pindar Πίνδαρος 522 – 443 BCE
Archetype of poetry

Themes: Travel

“What a fool you are! You have the greatest treasure in the world inside you and yet you go around asking other people for help…”

Chuang Tzu 莊周 369 – 286 BCE
(Zhuangzi)

Themes: Travel

50. Claws and Swords

“When there is no division between you and what is other, this is the ultimate experience of traveling.”

Lie Yukou 列圄寇/列禦寇/列子 1 via Eva Wong
(Liè Yǔkòu, Liezi)
from Liezi "True Classic of Simplicity and Perfect Emptiness”

Themes: Travel

“The crow—when travelling abroad—came back just as black.”

Anonymous 1
Freedom from the narrow boxes defined by personal history
from English proverb

Themes: Travel

“Old men and far travellers may lie with authority.”

Anonymous 1
Freedom from the narrow boxes defined by personal history

Themes: Travel Deception

“They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.”

Horace 65 – 8 BCE

Themes: Change Travel

47. Effortless Success
80. A Golden Age

“Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.”

Seneca ˈsɛnɪkə 4 BCE – 65 CE
(Lucius Annaeus)

Themes: Friendship Travel

“Like a traveler who takes care of a room at an inn, take great care with what you have while the world lets you have it... Inner peace begins when we stop saying of things, 'I have lost it' and instead say, 'it has been returned to where it came from.'”

Epictetus Ἐπίκτητος 55 – 135 CE via Sharon Lebell
from Discourses of Epictetus, Ἐπικτήτου διατριβαί

Themes: Travel

“Although we live today, we can understand the distant past. We can understand without going outside. If we don’t understand, going farther only leads us farther astray.”

Wang Bi 王弼 226 – 534 CE

Themes: Travel

15. Inscrutability

“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page... [but] Go not outside; truth dwells in the inner man.”

Augustine ɔːɡəstiːn 354 – 430 CE
(Saint Augustine, Saint Austin, Augustine of Hippo)

Themes: Travel

“‘Without traveling’ means to know without depending on previous or external experience… ‘without trying’ means to focus the spirit on the tranquility that excels at making things happen.”

Chéng Xuanying 成玄英 631 – 655 CE
(Ch'eng Hsuan-ying)

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“being taken to see vistas
didn't address my problems...
this universe is enormous,
my road goes on and on.”

Du Fu 杜甫 杜甫 712 – 770 CE via David Young
from Qiang Village Poems

Themes: Travel

“No direction is better or worse, East just as good as West. Those who know the meaning of this are free to go where they want.”

Han Shan 1
(Cold Mountain)

Themes: Travel

34. An Unmoored Boat

“For thirty years I sought God. But when I looked carefully I found that in reality God was the seeker and I the sought.”

Abu Yazid al-Bisṭāmī بایزید بسطامی‎‎ 804 – 874 CE

“The innate purity that is the nature of mind… exists within, so do not look elsewhere.”

Virupa བི་རཱུ་པ། 1 via Keith Dowman
(“Dakini Master”)
Mahasiddha #3
from Masters of Mahamudra

Themes: Mind Travel

6. The Source

“We deserve what we get. We bring it on ourselves… it isn’t going to be different anywhere else because we take ourselves with us.”

Mekhala མེ་ཁ་ལཱ། 1 via Keith Dowman
(“The Elder Severed-Headed Sister” )
Mahasiddha #66
from Masters of Enchantment

Themes: Travel Projection

“Don’t stop in a run-down shack in an isolated village. Go through the mountain pass of the buddhas and ancestors.”

Touzi Yiqing 投子義青 1032 – 1083 CE
(Tōsu Gisei, “Zen Master of Complete Compassion”)

“The reason sages of the past understood everything without going anywhere was simply because they kept their natures whole.”

Su Che 呂洞 1039 – 1112 CE via Red Pine
(Su Zhe)
Great writer of the Tang and Sung dynasties
from Tao-te-chen-ching-chu

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“Without the concept of location, where are you?”

Hóngzhì Zhēngjué 宏智正覺 1091 – 1157 CE
(Shōgaku)
from Book of Equanimity

Themes: Travel

“A person of the Way fundamentally does not dwell anywhere... The moon sets and the water is cool. Each bit of autumn contains vast interpenetration without bounds.”

Hóngzhì Zhēngjué 宏智正覺 1091 – 1157 CE via Dan Leighton
(Shōgaku)
from Cultivating the Emplty Field

Themes: Moon Travel

20. Unconventional Mind

“Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”

Rumi مولانا جلال‌الدین محمد بلخی 1207 – 1283 CE
(Rumi Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī)
from Masnavi مثنوي معنوي‎‎) "Rhyming Couplets of Profound Spiritual Meaning”

Themes: Freedom Travel

71. Sick of Sickness

“Why should I seek? I am the same as He I have been looking for myself!”

Rumi مولانا جلال‌الدین محمد بلخی 1207 – 1283 CE
(Rumi Mawlānā Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī)
from Masnavi مثنوي معنوي‎‎) "Rhyming Couplets of Profound Spiritual Meaning”

Themes: Travel

“My course is set for an uncharted sea.”

Dante 1265 – 1321 CE
(Durante degli Alighieri)

“Emptiness is the track on which the wise person travels.”

Tsongkhapa ཙོང་ཁ་པ། 1357 – 1419 CE
(Zongkapa Lobsang Zhaba, "the Man from Onion Valley")

Themes: Travel

“We have…beheld in the ocean, huge waves like mountains rising sky-high, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapors, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course rapid like that of a star, traversing the savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare.”

Zheng He 鄭和 1371 – 1435 CE

Themes: Travel

“I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty… go where you will… if you do not find your soul, the world will be unreal… Go not elsewhere.”

Kabīr कबीर 1399 – 1448 CE

80. A Golden Age

“Happiness is not a destination, it's a method of travel.”

John of the Cross 1542 – 1591 CE

“We have the knowledge not to search for divinity removed from us if we have it near; it is within us more than we ourselves are.”

Giordano Bruno 1548 – 1600 CE via Gosselin and Lerner

Themes: Travel God

47. Effortless Success

“Much that would be something has become nothing by being left alone, and what was nothing has become of consequence by being made much of… Often the remedy causes the disease. It is by no means the least of life’s rules to let things alone.”

Balthasar Gracian 1601 – 1658 CE

Themes: Letting Go Travel

47. Effortless Success

“Whether drifting through life on a boat or climbing toward old age leading a horse, each day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”

Matsuo Bashō 松尾 芭蕉 1644 – 1694 CE

47. Effortless Success

“Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.”

Jeremy Bentham 1748 – 1832 CE
from Principles of Morals and Legislation

47. Effortless Success

“Fortunate is he whose world lies in his home.”

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 1749 – 1832 CE
from Faust, part II

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“Wherever I happen to be is home.”

Ryokan 良寛大愚 1758 – 1758 CE
(Ryōkan Taigu,“The Great Fool”)

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit.”

Novalis 1772 – 1831 CE

Themes: Travel

80. A Golden Age

“Searching through the paths and levels for a place far away, they have never had a chance to arrive at buddhahood.”

Shabkar Tsokdruk Rangdrol ཞབས་དཀར་ཚོགས་དྲུག་རང་གྲོལ། 1781 – 1851 CE via Erik Pema Kunsang
from Flight of the Garuda

47. Effortless Success

“In wild places where no one lives is the market where samsara is traded for nirvana.”

Shabkar Tsokdruk Rangdrol ཞབས་དཀར་ཚོགས་དྲུག་རང་གྲོལ། 1781 – 1851 CE via Matthieu Ricard
from Journey to Enlightenment

Themes: Travel

40. Returning

“A man without a goal is like a ship without a rudder.”

Thomas Carlyle 1795 – 1881 CE
"Great Man” theory of history creator

“I’d need rest to refresh my brain, and to get rest it’s necessary to travel, and to travel one must have money, and in order to get money you have to work. . . . I am in a vicious circle . . .from which it is impossible to escape.”

Balzac 1799 – 1850 CE
(Honoré de Balzac)

Themes: Money Travel

“Traveling is s fool's paradise. Those who travel to be amused, or to get something they don't already have, travel away from themselves and grow old even in youth. The soul is no traveler and the wise stay at home except for when duty calls them away. But even when traveling in foreign lands, they are still at home and tour like a missionary of wisdom and virtue visiting people and cities lie a sovereign, not like an interloper or valet.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882 CE via Shan Dao
Champion of individualism
from Self Reliance

Themes: Travel

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882 CE
Champion of individualism

Themes: Beauty Travel

“I have traveled a great deal in Concord.”

Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862 CE
Father of environmentalism and America's first yogi
from Walden or Life in the Woods

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels , not of trade, but of thought.”

Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862 CE
Father of environmentalism and America's first yogi

“She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive out to where she could feel alone with the earth and sky, away from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.”

George Eliot 1819 – 1880 CE
(Mary Anne Evans)
Pioneering literary outsider

from Middlemarch

Themes: Travel

“It is not down on any map; true places never are.”

Herman Melville 1819 – 1891 CE
from Moby Dick or The Whale

Themes: Travel

“Adventure is not outside man; it is within.”

George Eliot 1819 – 1880 CE
(Mary Anne Evans)
Pioneering literary outsider

Themes: Travel Anonymity

“Like very many men is such cases, he put faith above all in change of place. If only it were not for these people, if only it were not for these circumstances, if only he could fly away from this accursed place—he would be altogether regenerated”

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky Фёдор Миха́йлович Достое́вский 1821 – 1881 CE via Constance Garnett
from Brothers Karamatzov

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”

Mark Twain 1835 – 1910 CE
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
America’s most famous author

Themes: Travel

“Each place has its own advantages - heaven for the climate, and hell for the society.”

Mark Twain 1835 – 1910 CE
(Samuel Langhorne Clemens)
America’s most famous author

Themes: Travel

41. Distilled Life

“Travel in all the four quarters of the earth, yet you will find nothing anywhere. Whatever there is, is only here.”

Ramakrishna 1836 – 1886 CE

Themes: Travel

“I have, thanks to my travels, added to my stock all the superstitions of other countries. I know them all now, and in any critical moment of my life, they all rise up in armed legions for or against me.”

Sarah Bernhardt 1844 – 1923 CE
“One of the finest actors of all time”

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”

Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 – 1894 CE

Themes: Travel Wu Wei

“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 1850 – 1894 CE

Themes: Friendship Travel

35. The Power of Goodness

“To be served by travel, before he sets out, the traveller must possess fixed interests and facilities. If he drifted aimlessly from country to country, he would not travel but only wander”

Santayana, George 1863 – 1952 CE
(Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás)
Powerfully influential, true-to-himself philosopher/poet

Themes: Travel

“Who knows the flower best? – the one who reads about it in a book, or the one who finds it wild on the mountainside?”

Alexandra David-Néel 1868 – 1969 CE

“It is marvelous how far afield some of us are willing to travel in pursuit of that beauty which we leave behind us at home? We mistake unfamiliarity for beauty; we darken our perceptions with idle foreignness. For want of that inner curiosity... we find ourselves hastening from land to land, gathering mere resemblances... With what pathetic diligence we collect peaks and passes in Switzerland... a flower blooms in our door-yard more wonderful than the shining heights of the Alps!”

David Grayson 1870 – 1946 CE
(Ray Stannard Baker)
One of the most insightful journalists, historians, and biographers of his time

from Adventures in Friendship

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust 1871 – 1922 CE
Apostle of Ordinary Mind
from In Search of Lost Time

Themes: Travel

“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”

Marcel Proust 1871 – 1922 CE
Apostle of Ordinary Mind
from In Search of Lost Time

Themes: Wisdom Travel

“Trade brings men into contact with tribal customs different from their own, and in so doing destroys the dogmatism of the untravelled.”

Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 CE
“20th century Voltaire”
from Unpopular Essays

Themes: Capitalism Travel

“Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”

Willa Cather 1873 – 1948 CE
Modern day Lao Tzu

Themes: Travel

80. A Golden Age

“There are two ways of getting home; and one of them is to stay there.”

G. K. Chesterton 1874 – 1936 CE

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”

G. K. Chesterton 1874 – 1936 CE

“The result of the voyage does not depend on the speed of the ship, but on whether or not it keeps a true course.”

Albert Schweitzer 1875 – 1965 CE

Themes: Travel

“All other memories of travels, people, and my surroundings have paled beside these interior happenings... Recollection of the outward events of my life has largely faded or disappeared... bouts with the unconscious are indelibly engraved upon my memory; everything else has lost importance”

Carl Jung 1875 – 1961 CE
Insightful shamanistic scientist
from Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Themes: Memory Travel Forget

“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”

Martin Buber מרטין בובר‎‎ 1878 – 1965 CE
from Ich und Du, I and Thou

Themes: Travel

45. Complete Perfection

“The solitary traveler is soon beyond the wood.”

Virginia Woolf 1882 – 1941 CE
from Mrs. Dalloway

“Some people look for a beautiful place, others make a place beautiful.”

Inayat Khan 1882 – 1927 CE

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.”

James Joyce 1882 – 1941 CE

Themes: Travel

“My life's greatest benefactors have been journeys and dreams... I have been ashamed many times in my life because I caught my soul not daring to do what supreme folly—the essence of life—called me to do.”

Nikos Kazantzakis 1883 – 1957 CE via P. A. Bien
from Report to Greco

Themes: Confidence Travel

“Every perfect traveler always creates the country where he travels.”

Nikos Kazantzakis 1883 – 1957 CE

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“Divorce is like travel: it is useless if we cannot change ourselves... all wives and husbands are substantially alike”

Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Pleasures of Philosophy

Themes: Travel

“The spirits do not like women with little children to stay too long away from their house… No one who is to become a skillful hunter or a a good shaman must remain out too long when visiting strange houses.”

Igjugarjuk 1 via Knud Rasmussen
Eskimo healer, Caribou teacher, great Inuit shaman
from The Fifth Thule Expedition

“Next to travel, the best education is history, which is travel extended into the past.”

Will (and Ariel) Durant 1885 – 1981 CE

“I hate travel and love my home.”

Will Durant 1885 – 1981 CE
Philosophy apostle and popularizer of history's lessons
from Fallen Leaves

Themes: Travel

“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”

T. S. Eliot 1888 – 1965 CE via "Little Gidding"
from The Four Quartets

Themes: Travel Wu Wei

10. The Power of Goodness

“We do not pass through the same door twice or return to the door through which we did not pass.”

T. S. Eliot 1888 – 1965 CE

Themes: Travel

41. Distilled Life

“Nobody needs to go anywhere else. We are all, if we only knew it, already there.”

Aldous Huxley 1894 – 1963 CE
from Island

Themes: Travel

80. A Golden Age

“For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.”

Aldous Huxley 1894 – 1963 CE

Themes: Books Travel

2. The Wordless Teachings

“As soon as you're alone, things lay hold of you by themselves and always force you to take the roads that are hardest to climb. And even if you don't get there, what fine views you have, and how reassuring everything is.”

Jean Giono 1895 – 1970 CE

4. The Father of All Things

“A good traveler does not know where he is going to, a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.”

Lín Yǔtáng 林語堂 1895 – 1976 CE

Themes: Travel

“We are—all of us—pilgrims who struggle along different paths toward the same destination.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1900 – 1944 CE

“The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart....To go alone...into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth--it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.”

Thomas Wolfe 1900 – 1938 CE
(Thomas Clayton Wolfe)
Father of autobiographical fiction

Themes: Travel

“No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.”

James Michener 1907 – 1997 CE
Historical and Generational Saga Master


from Hawaii (1959)​

Themes: Failure Travel

“Thinking that he must climb a mountain to know it, the mountain climber climbs the mountain... Unable to grasp the mountain in its full aspect, he is content with having seen only one small portion and climbs back down... to know the true mountain, one must see it from a point of remove that transcends the mountain.”

Masanobu Fukuoka 福岡 正信 1913 – 2008 CE
from Road Back to Nature

Themes: Travel

“For real happiness, for real lasting stable happiness, one has to make a journey deep within oneself and see that one gets rid of all the unhappiness and misery stored in the deeper levels of the mind.”

Goenka ဂိုအင်ကာ 1924 – 2013 CE
(Satya Narayan)
"The Man who Taught the World to Meditate"

Themes: Travel Happiness

“There is no place to go. The whole foundation is already here in each one of us.”

Toni Packer 1927 – 2013 CE
A Zen teacher minus the 'Zen' and minus the 'teacher.’

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I'm looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away.”

Robert M. Pirsig 1928 – 2017 CE
from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Themes: Travel Truth

“We tend to expect great things from ‘seeing the world’ and ‘getting experience.’…Lao Tzu’s point: it’s the inner eye that really sees the world.”

Ursula Le Guin 1929 – 2018 CE
from Lao Tzu - A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“So I had better fly in the ten directions even though I have lost the social custom and people call me aimless.
So I had better stay in one place even though I have lost the gypsy custom and people call me lazy.”

Thinley Norbu གདུང་སྲས་ཕྲིན་ལས་ནོར་བུ 1931 – 2011 CE
(Kyabjé Dungse)
from Magic Dance (1981)

Themes: Paradox Travel

“Herodotus's journeys are purposeful... [he] works hard on the road—he is a reporter, an anthropologist, an ethnographer, a historian... a typical wanderer, a pilgrim... he is the first to discover the world's multicultural nature, the first to argue that each culture requires acceptance and understanding, and that to understand it, one must first come to know it.”

Ryszard Kapuściński 1932 – 2007 CE
“One of the most credible journalists the world has ever seen"
from Travels with Herodotus (2004)

Themes: Travel

“there exists something like a contagion of travel, and the disease is essentially incurable... A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our door step once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long after we have come to a physical standstill.”

Ryszard Kapuściński 1932 – 2007 CE
“One of the most credible journalists the world has ever seen"
from Travels with Herodotus (2004)

Themes: Memory Travel

“Genuine travel has no destination. Genuine travelers travel not to overcome distance but to discover distance... Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else... All travel is therefore change within the traveler”

James P. Carse 1932 – 2020 CE
Thought-proving, influential, deep thinker
from Finite and Infinite Games

Themes: Travel

“Studying history is going on a journey and traveling into the past.”

Shan Dao 山道 1933 CE –
from Tao Te Ching — The Power of Goodness, the Wisdom Beyond Words

Themes: History Travel

47. Effortless Success

“Travelers on the path of our life experience; the wisdom, books, teachings, and quotations from the past become our shoes, bicycles, cars, trains, and planes taking us toward our true selves, awakened awareness, enlightenment.”

Shan Dao 山道 1933 CE –

Themes: Travel

“There comes . . . a longing never to travel again except on foot.”

Wendell Berry 1934 CE –

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.”

Wendell Berry 1934 CE –

Themes: Travel

81. Journey Without Goal

“Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.”

Jim Harrison 1937 – 2016 CE
"untrammeled renegade genius”
from After Ikkyu & Other Poems​

Themes: Travel

“People who take holidays, vacations, instead of finding luxury where they are, face spiritual problems. The physical world is the spiritual world and all the problems of the world are therefore spiritual problems.”

Chögyam Trungpa 1939 – 1987 CE via The Six Chakras and the Four Karmas
from Secret Beyond Thought, Boston, 1971

Themes: Problems Travel

“Of any stopping place in life, it is good to ask whether it will be a good place from which to go on as well as a good place to remain.”

Mary Catherine Bateson 1939 CE –

Themes: Travel

“Huxley’s 1932 novel is about a world without love. Far from being outdated, it has a profound message for our day showing us a society that confounds sex with love, family disintegrating under the impact of scientific reproduction techniques that turn out children perfectly adapted to their roles in society. Pornography, meaningless travel, and mindless consumerism fill the time of people who have no concept of religion, honor, or great literature.”

J. Rufus Fears 1945 – 2012 CE via Shan Dao

Themes: Travel

“… in this house that Carl Jung built, piling up stones with his own hands, at the very entrance, he found the need to chisel out these words… Sometimes I close my eyes and repeat them over and over, and they make me strangely calm. ‘Cold or Not, God Is Present.’”

Haruki Murakami 1949 CE – via Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel

Themes: Travel

47. Effortless Success

“Seek and you shall find your illusions through the magic of tourism.”

Amy Tan 1952 CE –
Rock and roll singer, bartender, and insightfully talented author
from Saving Fish From Drowning

Themes: Magic Travel

“Traveling makes your mind roll thunder like a train moving down the track. Except you don't know where the fuck that mind train is headed. And then all of a sudden, an idea shits in your head. And you think that shit smells good. Peace is a beautiful but shitty idea.”

Neil Gaiman 1960 CE –
Myth-transmitting creative maelstrom
from American Gods

Themes: Peace Travel
“Souls cross ages like clouds cross skies… Who can say where the cloud’s blowed from or who the soul’ll be ‘morrow?… only the atlas o’ clouds.”

David Mitchell 1969 CE –
from Cloud Atlas

“everything you will ever experience in life is within your own body and your own mind. Breaking out of the matrix or traveling to Fiji won't make any difference.”

Yuval Harari יובל נח הררי‎ 1976 CE –
Israeli historian, professor, and philosopher

from 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018)

Themes: Travel

“Romanticism, which encourages variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism... [it] tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experiences as we can... go traveling in distant lands, sample various kinds of relationships, try different cuisines, different styles of music”

Yuval Harari יובל נח הררי‎ 1976 CE –
Israeli historian, professor, and philosopher

from Sapiens

Themes: Travel

Sources

Odyssey, Ὀδύσσεια

by Homer

Primogenitor of Western culture

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