Quotes About Exploration

All places, no matter where, no matter what, are worth visiting.

Fiction gives us the second chance that life denies us.

If I read enough about one country I sometimes found that the intensity of the reading removed by desire to travel there.

The dubious achievement in travel these days is enduring the persistent nuisance of a succession of airports in order to arrive at a distant place for a brief interlude of the exotic

Time is a factor in travel, one of the most crucial.

To travel unconnected, away from anyone's gaze or reach, is a bliss.

A viagem é muito mais recompensadora quando deixa de ter que ver com a nossa chegada a um destino e se torna indistinguível de vivermos a nossa vida.

Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. -Paul Theroux, novelist (b. 1941)

I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about.

You travel all over, the woman said. Do you write about your travels? I said, Yes, I did. Articles. Books. Whatever. You must write Paul Theroux-type travel books, she said. I said, Exactly, and told her why.

On that trip it was my good fortune to be wrong; being mistaken is the essence of the traveler's tale.

I decided that travel was flight and pursuit in equal parts

All solitary travel offers a sort of special license allowing you to be anyone you want to be

And yet on that bench at Jacobacci, I was glad I had left everyone else behind. Although this was a town with a main street and a railway station, and people with dogs and electric lights it was near enough to the end of the earth to give me the impression that I was a solitary explorer in a strange land. That illusion (which was an illusion in the South Pole and at the headwaters of the Nile) was enough of a satisfaction to me to make me want to go forward.

and the relief of being able to walk around without having to search for a parking place added to the pleasure of strolling

Nothing is more satisfying in travel than to land in a place and assume an occupation, even a temporary one, as a teacher.

What he liked best was taking things apart, even books, even the Bible. He said the Bible was like an owner's guide, a repair manual to an unfinished invention. He also said the Bible was a wilderness. It was one of Father's theories that there were parts of the Bible the no one had ever read, just as there were parts of the world where no one had ever set foot.

Texas A&M International

What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere if you're not in a hurry.

The whole point of adventure is that it is unplanned; a leap in the dark, verging on the unfortunate, offering glimpses of danger; and what separates adventure from disaster is that you live to tell the tale.

the conceit of the long-distance traveler is the belief that he is going so far, he will be alone—inconceivable that another person has the same good idea.

was happiest finding my own way and did not require a liaison man. It had been my intention to stay on the train, without bothering about arriving anywhere; sightseeing

It is fatal to know too much at the outset. Boredom comes as quickly to the traveler who knows his route as to the novelist who is over certain of his plot.

In a routine that served me for the next few weeks, I wandered around the busy, seemingly safe part of the city.