Tao Te Ching
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.
Quotes (116)
“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.”
“Mindful of death and appreciating where they are,
They have no need for long journeys.”
“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.”
“The Great Way is level and not far from oneself. Those who seek it afar go and then return.”
“Into the same river no man can step twice; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you.”
“Dear to a man is his own home city, his comrades and kinsmen. But to foolish men belongs only a love for things afar.”
“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…”
“When there is no division between you and what is other, this is the ultimate experience of traveling.”
“They change their sky, not their soul, who rush across the sea.”
“Everywhere is nowhere. When a person spends all his time in foreign travel, he ends by having many acquaintances, but no friends.”
“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.'”
“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.”
“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.”
“‘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.”
“being taken to see vistas
didn't address my problems...
this universe is enormous,
my road goes on and on.”
“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.”
“For thirty years I sought God. But when I looked carefully I found that in reality God was the seeker and I the sought.”
“The innate purity that is the nature of mind… exists within, so do not look elsewhere.”
“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.”
“Don’t stop in a run-down shack in an isolated village. Go through the mountain pass of the buddhas and ancestors.”
“The reason sages of the past understood everything without going anywhere was simply because they kept their natures whole.”
“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.”
“Why do you stay in prison when the door is so wide open?”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.”
“We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit.”
“In wild places where no one lives is the market where samsara is traded for nirvana.”
“Searching through the paths and levels for a place far away, they have never had a chance to arrive at buddhahood.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.”
“Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels , not of trade, but of thought.”
“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.”
“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”
“Each place has its own advantages - heaven for the climate, and hell for the society.”
“Travel in all the four quarters of the earth, yet you will find nothing anywhere. Whatever there is, is only here.”
“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.”
“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move.”
“We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is an honest friend.”
“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”
“Who knows the flower best? – the one who reads about it in a book, or the one who finds it wild on the mountainside?”
“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!”
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
“Trade brings men into contact with tribal customs different from their own, and in so doing destroys the dogmatism of the untravelled.”
“One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
“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”
“The result of the voyage does not depend on the speed of the ship, but on whether or not it keeps a true course.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Divorce is like travel: it is useless if we cannot change ourselves... all wives and husbands are substantially alike”
“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.”
“Next to travel, the best education is history, which is travel extended into the past.”
“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.”
“We do not pass through the same door twice or return to the door through which we did not pass.”
“For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.”
“A good traveler does not know where he is going to, a perfect traveler does not know where he came from.”
“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.”
“We are—all of us—pilgrims who struggle along different paths toward the same destination.”
“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.”
“No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I'm looking for the truth,’ and so it goes away.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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”
“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.”
“Studying history is going on a journey and traveling into the past.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“… 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.’”
“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.”
“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.” 
“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”
“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.”
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