Quotes by Travelers

Whether your situation is dire or stable often depends on your point of view. Exploring different vantage points can give you valuable perspective.

It seems to me that the good lord in his infinate wisdom gave us three things to make life bearable- hope, jokes, and dogs. But the greatest of these was dogs.

Compulsive reading relieves the anxiety that comes from tramping through the forest of meditation in search of clearings.

Good Americans when they die go to Paris.

I admire those believers who speak of such things with the same aplomb as if the'd just split a beer with God in the cabin next door.

The scenery doesn't necessarily improve in proportion to how far you travel or how much you spend.

In vain does the disguised traveller inwardly rebel against the influences and impressions which are wearing away his real self. The impressions of the past lose more and more their hold on him until they fade away, leaving the traveller hopelessly struggling in the toils of his own fiction, and the rôle he had assumed soon becomes second nature with him.

And it was only then that I realized what I had let myself in for, and only then I realized how bloody thick I had been not to have predicted it. It would seem that the combination of elements--woman, desert, camels, aloneness--hit some soft sport in this era's passionless, heartless, aching psyche. It fired the imaginations of people who seem themselves as alienated, powerless, unable to do anything about a world gone mad. And wouldn't it be my luck to pick just this combination. The reaction was totally unexpected and it was very, very weird. I was now public property. I was now a kind of symbol. I was now an object of ridicule for small-minded sexists, and I was a crazy, irresponsible adventurer (though not as crazy as I would have been had I failed). But worse than all that, I was now a mythical being who had done something courageous and outside the possibilities that ordinary people could hope for. And that was the antithesis of what I wanted to share. That anyone could do anything. If I could bumble my way across a desert, then anyone could do anything. And that was true especially for women, who have used cowardice for so long to protect themselves that it has become a habit.

In the Balkans the peasants say that if you long for faraway countries and leave your own land and home to find them, you are born under A LILAC-BLEEDING STAR.

Life rarely follows a straight line. Success is a process of trying, reacting, and changing.

Ideologies, like dogs, remain just outside the hermits door.

Great matter-days remain on the day stone balance, affecting your life on the day the occur and every day thereafter. So the earlier they happen, the better; waiting means potentially sacrificing years or even decades of benefit.

Since by definition learning is change, when you learn nature's lessons, you are changed.

The question I'm most commonly asked is "Why?" A more pertinent question might be, why is it that more people don't attempt to escape the limitations imposed upon them? If Tracks has a message at all, it is that one can be awake to the demand for obedience that seems natural simply because it is familiar. Wherever there is pressure to conform (one person's conformity is often in the interests of another person's power), there is a requirement to resist. Of course I did not mean that people should drop what they were doing and head for the wilder places, certainly not that they should copy what I did. I meant that one can choose adventure in the most ordinary of circumstances. Adventure of the mind, or to use an old-fashioned word, the spirit.

To be "modern" means refusing to worry about where the benefits of progress actually come from.

It is good to know that out there, in a forest in the world, there is a cabin where something is possible...

I kept getting the odd sensation that I was in fact perfectly stationary, and that I was pushing the world around under my feet.

There’s the wind on the heath, brother; if I could only feel that, I would gladly live for ever.

They think the government shows people everything —how to work, study, eat, sleep and that’s it. They are afraid of change. They do not understand that if you want to do something, you should do it. You are free, people, free!

The cabin will return to the soil when abandoned by its owner, yet in its simplicity it offers perfect protection against the seasonal cold without disfiguring the sheltering forest. With the yurt and the igloo, it figures among the handsomest human responses to environmental adversity.

If I do depart this world out here, let it be known that I went out grinning will you, and loving it. LOVING IT.Steve, are you listening ? I FEEL GREAT. Life’s so joyous, so sad, so ephemeral, so crazy, so meaningless, so goddamn funny. This is paradise, and I wish I could give you some.