15 Travel Quotes of the Day; Featuring Mark Twain...

I absolutely adore and swear by these travel quotes for two reasons:

- They are all true (as stereotypical as they might sound) and

- They are actually helpful in planning a trip

Believe it or not, some of them are as old as hundreds of years, but they still hold true to today’s attitude and behavior towards traveling. They also speak close to a traveler’s heart on what’s important for adventures- and cultures- seekers. Ones of my favorite travel quotes are by Mark Twain.

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910, was a zealous traveler. His travels inspired him to write some of the best known to the world and popular novels and short stories, such as Roughing It, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and of course our favorites of all times - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Some of the places he visited in America were the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, the Mormon community in Salt Lake City, and Virginia City, Nevada. Twain also traveled to San Francisco, California, which inspired him to write a quote about San Francisco weather: “The Coldest Winter he ever spent in his life, was a Summer in San Francisco,” with which I completely agree as I’ve never felt colder in the summer than the way I did in San Francisco all through summers of 2000 and 2001. It truely speaks to most of people who have been to or lived in San Francisco.

However, U.S.A. was not the only country he’s explored; Twain did do a tour in Europe and the Middle East, which travel experience inspired him to write a popular collection of travel letters compiled in The Innocents Abroad in 1869.

Following the Equator was Twain’s fifth and final travel book. His 1895-96 journeys - from Paris, across the United States, through the South Pacific and Australia, to Sri Lanka and India, around Africa and to London - resulted in his last travelogue. Not as well-known as the above-mentioned The Innocents Abroad, Following the Equator nevertheless endures for his observations on the world.

15 Travel Quotes of the Day:

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

2. I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. - Mark Twain

3. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things 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

4. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” - Mark Twain

5. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. - Mark Twain

6. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

7. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” - Samuel Johnson

8. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” - Paul Fussell

9. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

10. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” - Moorish proverb

11. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” - Dagobert D. Runes

12. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” - John Steinbeck

13. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” - Lin Yutang

14. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” - Aldous Huxley

15. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” - Samuel Johnson

Check in with me next week on the next 15 Travel Quotes of the Day, featuring quotes by Lao Tzu, a philosopher of ancient China and a central figure in Taoism.