Quotes from Rolf Potts

The value of your travels does not hinge on how many stamps you have in your passport when you get home -- and the slow nuanced experience of a single country is always better than the hurried, superficial experience of forty countries.

Work is when you confront the problems you might otherwise be tempted to run away from

Thus, the question of how and when to start vagabonding is not really a question at all. Vagabonding starts now. Even if the practical reality of travel is still months or years away, vagabonding begins the moment you stop making excuses, start saving money, and begin to look at maps with the narcotic tingle of possibility. From here, the reality of vagabonding comes into sharper focus as you adjust your worldview and begin to embrace the exhilarating uncertainty that true travel promises.

Money, of course, is still needed to survive, but time is what you need to live. So, save what little money you possess to meet basic survival requirements, but spend your time lavishly in order to create the life values that make the fire worth the candle. Dig?

The simple willingness to improvise is more vital, in the long run, than research.

Vagabonding is an attitude—a friendly interest in people, places, and things that makes a person an explorer in the truest, most vivid sense of the word. Vagabonding is not a lifestyle, nor is it a trend. It's just an uncommon way of looking at life—a value adjustment from which action naturally follows. And, as much as anything, vagabonding is about time—our only real commodity—and how we choose to use it.

having an adventure is sometimes just a matter of going out and allowing things to happen in a strange and amazing new environment—not so much a physical challenge as a psychic one.

Travel, I was coming to realize, was a metaphor not only for the countless options life offers but also for the fact that choosing one option reduces you to the parameters of that choice. Thus, in knowing my possibilities, I also knew my limitations.

People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.

you should view each new travel frustration—sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict—as just another curious facet in the vagabonding adventure.

those who travel the world hoping to get "blinded by the light" are often blind to the light that's all around them.

My greatest skill has been to want little. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN A

The more we associate experience with cash value, the more we think that money is what we need to live. And the more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we're too poor to buy our freedom.

We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope;

finding a singular travel experience doesn't require heroism so much as a simple change of mind-set. The reason so many travelers become frustrated while visiting world-famous destinations is that they are still playing by the rules of home, which "reward" you for following set routines and protocols.

After all, vagabonding involves sacrifices, and its particular sacrifices are not for everyone.

Sadly, the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" ("someday I'll do this, someday I'll do that") is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro

People say you have to travel to see the world. Sometimes I think that if you just stay in one place and keep your eyes open, you're going to see just about all that you can handle. —PAUL AUSTER, SMOKE

If you view the world as a predominately hostile place, it will be," wrote Ed Buryn.

Vagabonding is about using the prosperity and possibility of the information age to increase your personal options instead of your personal possessions.

antisabbatical"—a job approached "with the sole intention of staying for a limited period of time (often one year)…to raise enough funds to partake in another, more personally meaningful activity.

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU, WALDEN

The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.

Seeing' as you travel is somewhat of a spiritual exercise: a process not of seeking interesting surroundings, but of being continually interested in whatever surrounds you.