Quotes about travel
page 4

“Sometimes it's a little better to travel than to arrive”

Robert M. Pirsig book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values

“I want to urge you very strongly to travel as much as you can, and to evolve yourself as an internationalist. It's as important a part of your education as a radical as the reading of any book.”

Christopher Hitchens Letters to a Young Contrarian

Source: Letters to a Young Contrarian

Books, Education, Reading, Parting

“A wise man travels to discover himself.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

“We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: " A Wind Storm in the Forests of the Yuba http://books.google.com/books?id=zj2gAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA55", Scribner's Monthly, volume XVII, number 1 (November 1878) pages 55-59 (at page 59); modified slightly and reprinted in The Mountains of California http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_mountains_of_california/ (1894), chapter 10: A Wind-Storm in the Forests  <br class="br">Context: We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true; but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings — many of them not so much.

Men, Way, Tree

“In America there are two classes of travel — first class, and with children.”

Robert Benchley (1889–1945) American comedian

Source: "Kiddie-Kar Travel", Pluck and Luck (1925) http://books.google.com/books?id=ODtLAAAAIAAJ&q=%22In+America+there+are+two+classes+of+travel+first+class+and+with+children%22&pg=PA6#v=onepage; also in D.A.C. News http://www.dacnews.com/, September 1923 http://books.google.com/books?id=uLl9ULzkvikC&q=%22Kiddie+kar+travel%22&pg=PA27#v=onepage

Children

“Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: A Week at the Airport: A Heathrow Diary

Hope, Change

“It is the middle of December now, and we are about to travel to Switzerland - where we plan to ski a little, relax a little, and shoot a Dutch politician a little.”

Hugh Laurie book The Gun Seller

Source: The Gun Seller (1996)

“I simply believe that a book has a journey to make, and should not be condemned to being stuck on a shelf… Let’s leave our books free to travel, then, to be touched by other hands, and enjoyed by other eyes.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Books

“News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.”

Charles Bukowski book Ham on Rye

Source: Ham on Rye

“I think one travels more usefully when they travel alone, because they reflect more."

(June 19, 1787)”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 11: January 1787 to August 1787

Thinking

“Traveling has less to do with seeing things than experiencing them….”

Nicholas Sparks book The Choice

Travis Parker, Chapter 8, p. 101
Source: 2000s, The Choice (2007)

“Anyone who needs more than one suitcase is a tourist, not a traveler”

Ira Levin book Rosemary's Baby

Source: Rosemary's Baby

“Through travel I first became aware of the outside world; it was through travel that I found my own introspective way into becoming a part of it.”

Eudora Welty book One Writer's Beginnings

Source: One Writer's Beginnings

World, Way, Parting

“When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

Source: The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

Time

“Time to travel, to acquiesce to fate.”

Patti Smith M Train

M Train

Fate, Time

“Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are all time travellers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day.”

Jasper Fforde book Lost in a Good Book

Source: Lost in a Good Book

Time

“One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.”

Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer

“My money's on the lady," he drawled. "You don't tame a vixen, you just travel in her wake.”

Lora Leigh (1965) American writer

Source: Hidden Agendas

Money

“My grandfather always says that's what books are for," Ashoke said, using the opportunity to open the volume in his hands. “To travel without moving an inch.”

Jhumpa Lahiri book The Namesake

Source: The Namesake, (2003) p. 16.

Books

“And as the years flowed by, some villagers told travelers of a beast and a beauty who lived in the castle and could be seen walking on the battlements, and others told of two beauties, and others, of two beasts.”

Emma Donoghue (1969) Irish novelist, playwright, short-story writer and historian

Source: Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins

Beauty

“to travel is worth any cost or sacrifice.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

“Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.”

Nick Hornby book High Fidelity

Source: High Fidelity

Women, Men

“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Winter, Reading, Night

“Travel is rich with learning opportunities, and the ultimate sourvenir is a broader perspective.”

Rick Steves (1955) US travel writer

Learning

“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1920s, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), p. 1

Home, Knowledge

“Travelers, there is no path, paths are made by walking.”

Antonio Machado book Kampos di Kastilia

"Proverbios y cantares XXIX" [Proverbs and Songs 29], Campos de Castilla (1912); trans. Betty Jean Craige in Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Louisiana State University Press, 1979)
Context: Wanderer, your footprints are
the path, and nothing else;
wanderer, there is no path,
the path is made by walking.
Walking makes the path,
and on glancing back
one sees the path
that will never trod again.
Wanderer, there is no path—
Just steles in the sea.

“It's like time travel only, you know, slower…”

Christopher Moore (1957) American writer of comic fantasy

Time

“Travel is never a matter of money but of courage”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Source: Aleph

Money, Courage

“Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

Books, Waiting

“Remember that any meal can be your last. You chose to travel with us, so tonight you will eat fish. Tomorrow, you may die.”

Robert Jordan The Dragon Reborn

Source: The Dragon Reborn

Fish

“There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.”

D.E. Stevenson (1892–1973) British writer

Source: Listening Valley

People, Books, Winter, Help

“Travel opens your mind as few other things do.”

Libba Bray book Rebel Angels

Source: Rebel Angels

“When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.”

Clifton Fadiman (1904–1999) American editor

People, Country

“Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know “why” I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and some of the roads weren’t paved.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

People, Way

“You mean old books?"

"Stories written before space travel but about space travel."

"How could there have been stories about space travel before --"

"The writers," Pris said, "made it up.”

Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Source: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Books

“To travel is the experience of ceasing to be the person you are trying to be, and becoming the person you really are.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Source: Warrior of the Light

Personality

“No matter how far you travel, you can never get away from yourself. It’s like your shadow. It follows you everywhere. -Komura”

Haruki Murakami (1949) Japanese author, novelist

Source: After the Quake

“I now know, by an almost fatalistic conformity with the facts, that my destiny is to travel…”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Source: The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey

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

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

"A Trip to Anhwei", in With Love And Irony (1940), p. 145

Beauty, Home

“I have seen sights and travelled in countries you cannot imagine. I have been afraid and I have been in danger, and I have never for one moment thought that I would throw myself at at a man for his help.”

Philippa Gregory book The Queen's Fool

Source: The Queen's Fool

Imagination, Help, Country

“Like some wines our love could neither mature nor travel.”

Graham Greene book The Comedians

Source: The Comedians

Love, Wine

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Bronze Beta web message board, (14 February 2004) http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~hsiao/media/tv/buffy/bronze/20040214.html;after Whedon's discovery that The WB had cancelled Angel. Compare: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" (1916). <br class="br">Context: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN' SHOW. I totally shoulda took the road that had all those people on it. Damn.

“A danger of travel is that we see things at the wrong time, before we have had a chance to build up the necessary receptivity and when new information is therefore as useless and fugitive as necklace beads without a connecting chain.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Art of Travel

Chance, Time

“Travel's greatest purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

“If I'd learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don't talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.”

Alex Garland book The Beach

Variant: If I'd learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. DOn't talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a vida, pack a bag, and it just happens.
Source: The Beach

Books, Way

“If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

People, Star, Light

“Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.”

Pat Conroy (1945–2016) American novelist

“The greatest tales, well told, awaken the fears and longings of the listeners. Each man hears a different story. Each is touched by it according to his inner self. The words go to the ear, but the true message travels straight to the spirit.”

Juliet Marillier book Son of the Shadows

Source: Son of the Shadows

Fear

“Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going.”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

“You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you’re like an immigrant to your own world. You don’t have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.”

Shaun Tan (1974) Australian illustrator, writer, and animated filmmaker

World, Cars, Drawing

“The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail. Travel too fast,
and you miss all you are traveling for.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

“Throughout my life my greatest benefactors have been my travels and my dreams. Very few men, living or dead, have helped me in my struggles.”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Life, Men, Dreams, Help

“But, how do you know if an ending is truly good for the characters unless you've traveled with them through every page?”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Source: Midnight in Austenland

“What if I travel so far away in my dreams that I can't get back in time to wake up?”

Ruth Ozeki book A Tale for the Time Being

Source: A Tale for the Time Being

Dreams, Time

“We travel for romance, we travel for architecture, and we travel to be lost.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

“Traveling is all very well and good as long as you knew there is a place or person you can call home”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Source: Mercy

Home, Personality

“A word grows to a thought – a thought to an idea – an idea to an act. The change is slow, and the Present is a sluggish traveler loafing in the path Tomorrow wants to take.”

Beryl Markham book West with the Night

Source: West with the Night

Idea, Change

“Most people who travel look only at what they are directed to look at. Great is the power of the guidebook maker, however ignorant.”

John Muir book Travels in Alaska

Source: Travels in Alaska

People

“The saddest journey in the world is the one that follows a precise itinerary. Then you're not a traveler. You're a f@@king tourist.”

Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director

World

“Tourists went on holidays while travellers did something else. They travelled.”

Alex Garland book The Beach

Source: The Beach

Holiday

“Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.”

Maya Angelou book Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

Source: Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993) p. 12.

People, Idea, Understanding, Cry

“Travel, trouble, music, art, a kiss, a frock, a rhyme --
I never said they feed my heart, but still they pass my time.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Source: The Portable Dorothy Parker

Art, Music, Kiss, Time

“The stars, that nature hung in heaven, and filled their lamps with everlasting oil, give due light to the misled and lonely traveler".”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Star, Nature, Light

“Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.”

Paul Theroux (1941) American travel writer and novelist

“Paul Theroux, Restless Writer Of the Rails“ by Paul Hendrickson, Washington Post (September 20, 1979).

“My son, what you are attempting – shadow-travel across the world, carrying the statue of Athena – it may well destroy you.’
‘Thanks for the encouragement.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

World

“the man in black travels with your soul in his pocket.”

Stephen King book The Gunslinger

Source: The Gunslinger

Soul

“Balthazar pledged to die defending his royal house of Lumuatere. Finnikin swore to be their protector and guide for as long as he lived. Lucian vowed he would be the light whom they traveled toward in times of need.”

Melina Marchetta Finnikin of the Rock

Source: Finnikin of the Rock

Light, Time, Housing

“Rumor travels Faster, but it don't stay put as long as Truth.”

Will Rogers (1879–1935) American humorist and entertainer

"Politics Getting Ready to Jell" 
The Illiterate Digest (1924)
Context: Every Gag I tell must be based on truth. No matter how much I may exaggerate it, it must have a certain amount of Truth.... Now Rumor travels Faster, but it don't stay put as long as Truth.

Truth

“A cannonball travels only two thousand miles an hour; light travels two hundred thousand miles a second. Such is the superiority of Jesus Christ over Napoleon.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Light, Christ

“You have not traveled enough," she said. "Or you'd know that every journey
makes its own map across your heart.”

Sharon Shinn (1957) American science fiction writer

Source: Mystic and Rider

Heart

“Mostly you meet friends when traveling by accident, like by sitting next to them on the train, or in a restaurant, or in a holding cell.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Training

“I kept staring into the blackness of the woods, drawn into the darkness as I always had been. I suddenly realized how alone I was. (But this is how you travel, the wind whispered back, this is how you've always lived.)”

Bret Easton Ellis book Lunar Park

Source: Lunar Park

“We have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us — the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth

Episode 1, Opening introduction voice-over
The Power of Myth (1988)

God, World, Time

“In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

Life

“I traveled the globe as always, handing souls to the conveyor belt of eternity.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Soul

“The three saddest things are the ill wanting to be well, the poor wanting to be rich, and the constant traveler saying 'anywhere but here'.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

“somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: 100 Selected Poems

“Insomnia is an all-night travel agency with posters advertising faraway places.”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

Source: Dime-Store Alchemy

Night

“We have traveled through space and time. We have been many places. Visited many worlds. And there is good news: the acoustics everywhere are terrific.”

Libba Bray Going Bovine

Source: Going Bovine

World, Time

“Then, bidding farewell to The Knick-Knack, I went to collect the few personal belongings which, at that time, I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.”

Colette (1873–1954) 1873-1954 French novelist: wrote Gigi

Source: Gigi, Julie de Carneilhan, and Chance Acquaintances: Three Short Novels

Cats, Solitude, Time, Personality

“I have wandered all my life, and I have also traveled; the difference between the two being this, that we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

As quoted in Lifetime Speaker's Encyclopedia (1962) edited by Jacob Morton Braude, p. 829
As quoted in Traveling for Her: An Inspirational Guide (2008) by Amber Israelsen, p. 2
Variant: I have wandered all my life, and I have traveled; the difference between the two is this — we wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.

Life

“To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Jesting Pilate: The Diary of a Journey, (1926)
Source: https://archive.org/details/jestingpilatedia0000huxl/page/214/mode/2up?q=To+travel+is+to+discover+that+everyone+is+wrong Part II: Malaya

Country

“So much better to travel than to arrive.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

“Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.”

Rudyard Kipling book Soldiers Three

Soldiers Three, The Winners (L'Envoi: What Is the Moral?) http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/p2/winners.html, Stanza 1 (1888). <br class="br">Other works

“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey;”

John Hope Franklin (1915–2009) American historian

World

“When the ceremony ended Anne and I stayed on the field to greet friends, many of whom had traveled to share the ceremony with us. In one respect it was a difficult day at the end of a difficult month. But in the broader view of life, it was a magical evening at the end of an incredible journey we shared. We walked back over to the quarters we would move out of a few days later, and found friends in the yard and almost every room. At one point I saw Mike Hall, Charlie Flynn, Shawn Lowery, and Casey Welch standing in the fading summer light. I thought of my father, of my first day at West Point, and of our cold Christmas Eve flight over Afghanistan seven months before. The final words of my last speech in uniform, spoken just an hour before were repeated in my mind: "If I had it to do over again, I'd do some things in my career differently, but not many. I believed in people, and I still believe in them. I trusted and I still trust. I cared and I still care. I wouldn't have it any other way… To the young leaders of today and tomorrow, it's a great life. Thank you."”

Stanley A. McChrystal (1954) American general

Closing words, p. 394
My Share Of The Task (2013)

Life, People, Way, Light

“Poverty Jet Set: A group of people given to chronic travelling at the expense of long-term job stability or a permenant residence. Tend to have doomed and extremely expensive phone call relationships with people named Serge or Ilyana. Tend to discuss frequent flyer programs at parties.”

Douglas Coupland (1961) Canadian novelist, short story writer, playwright, and graphic designer

Definitions

People

“The century of revolution in the United States after the Civil War was economic, not political, freeing households from an unremitting daily grind of painful manual labor, household drudgery, darkness, isolation, and early death. Only one hundred years later, daily life had changed beyond recognition. Manual outdoor jobs were replaced by work in air-conditioned environments, housework was increasingly performed by electric appliances, darkness was replaced by light, and isolation was replaced not just by travel, but also by color television images bringing the world into the living room. Most important, a newborn infant could expect to live not to age forty-five, but to age seventy-two. The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016, p. 1 ; Lead paragraph

Life, Death, Pain, War

“I am willing to join in your statement on the ground that I feel about the future of the United States whenever the President starts out on his travels the way the Marshal of the Supreme Court does when he opens a session of that Court. You will recall that he ends up his liturgy by saying "God save the United States for the Court is now sitting.”

Dean Acheson (1893–1971) Statesman and lawyer

Grapes from Thorns (1972), page 67.

God, Way, Feeling, Future

“It doesn't matter how you travel it, it's the same road. It doesn't get any easier when you get bigger, it gets harder. And it will kill you if you let it.”

James Brown (1933–2006) American singer, songwriter, musician, and recording artist

Brown, J. & Tucker, B.B. (1986). James Brown: The Godfather of Soul. Macmillan: New York. ISBN 0-02517-430-4

“If one does not wish to be dissatisfied with one’s lot at home, one ought to go where the flies and the stinks are, which means the Middle East. This is also a good way of reconciling oneself to one’s laws and police force and the probity of one’s magistrates. The really great British travellers, like Charles M. Doughty for instance, to say nothing of ‘Eothen’ Kinglake, always went East, but not too far East. When you get to Southeast Asia you find no dirt or flies but the suspicion that you are in a tropical paradise, and then you go to pieces. It is essential, when travelling, to feel that you belong to a superior civilization, and the lands of the Arabs lavishly grant opportunities to nourish this conviction….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Law, Way, Feeling, Home

“It is possible for you to project to a future event in which you will be involved and by an act that you make in the projection, alter the course that this future will take. Such an action would therefore appear to happen twice, once in your present and once in your future. But in the future, you would be the one whose course is altered from this traveling self from the past.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Seth, Dreams & Projections of Consciousness, (1986), p. 322, quoting from Session 262

Appearance, Past, Future

“That's the trouble with foreign travel. You spend half your time trying to find edible food, and the rest fighting off men who profess extravagant love to your female companions. I'm amazed how many women believe outright lies from foreigners.”

Lindsey Davis book A Body in the Bath House

A Body in the Bath House

Love, Women, Men, Food

“Our life is a constant journey, from birth to death. The landscape changes, the people change, our needs change, but the train keeps moving. Life is the train, not the station. And what you’re doing now isn’t traveling, it’s just changing countries, which is completely different”

Paulo Coelho book Aleph

Aleph (2011)

Life, Death, People, Birth

“The eye travels along the paths cut out for it in the work.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

I.13 Productive | Receptive, p. 33
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

“The State is at the centre and the society surrounds it. Disturbances of society go in a broad spectrum from more disturbance of the serenity of life to jeopardy of the State. The acts become graver (and graver) as we journey from the peripheral of the largest circle towards the centre. In this journey we travel first through public tranquility, then through public order and lastly to the security of the State.”

Mohammad Hidayatullah (1905–1992) 11th Chief Justice of India

In one of his judgements.
Full Court Reference in Memory of The Late Justice M. Hidayatullah

Life

“A work upon the plan originally contemplated by the Author seems still to be required, to initiate the young and uninstructed in the study of those MEDALS 0F CREATION—those electrotypes of nature—the mineralized remains of the plants and animals which successively flourished in the earlier ages of our planet, in periods incalculably remote, and long antecedent to all human history and tradition. With this conviction the present volumes are offered… as a guide for the Student and the Amateur Collector of fossil remains; for the intelligent Observer who may desire to possess a general knowledge of the subject, without intending to pursue Geology as a science; and for the Tourist who may wish, in the course of his travels, to employ profitably a leisure hour in quest of those interesting memorials of the ancient physical revolutions of our globe, which he will find everywhere presented to his observation.”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

Preface to the First Edition
The Medals of Creation or First Lessons in Geology (1854)

Age, History, Intelligence, Nature

“Earthquakes radiate waves with periods of tenths of seconds to several minutes. Rocks behave like elastic solids at these frequencies. Elastic solids allow a variety of wave types and this makes the ground motion after an earthquake or explosion (called an event) quite complex. There are two basic types of elastic wave: one involving compression and rarefaction of the elastic material in the direction of propagation of the wave, and one involving no compression but shear of the elastic material perpendicular to its direction of propagation. These are called P and S waves respectively, for primary and secondary since the P wave travels fastest and arrives first.”

David Gubbins (1947) British university teacher

[Seismology and plate tectonics, Cambridge, UK; New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990, http://books.google.com/books?id=tZRxPzwoChIC&pg=PA4] (pp. 4–5)
Seismology and Plate Tectonics (1990)

“Finally Jones came in with a blinding fastball, the way Sad Sam used to throw ’em, and Clemente unloaded. The wind was blowing in from left field that day, and blowing hard. This was 1960, remember, before the fences had been moved in, and nobody was hitting home runs at Candlestick. Not Mays, not Cepeda, not anybody. Clemente’s bat hit the ball, and the result absolutely clubbed the crowd into awed silence for a long moment. Right into that wet whipping wind the ball carried. Right on through, hit 120 feet high in a long soaring majestic parabola that came down finally over 450 feet away. There is just no way of telling how far Clemente’s home run blast would have traveled had it not been for that wind. Suffice it to say partisan Giant fans suddenly broke their shell-shocked silence and let loose a gagantic roar. For two innings the stadium buzzed. For days the Giants talked about it. Even today if you slip up behind a Giant pitcher and suddenly whisper in his ear: ‘Remember the home run Clemente hit?’ he’s likely to jump as high as if he’d been caught putting spit on baseballs.”

Arnold Hano (1922) American writer

From "Roberto Clemente: Arriba!" in Baseball Stars of 1962 (March 1962), edited by Ray Robinson, p. 115
Sports-related

Sadness, Way, Home, Silence

“I never believed, as many Marxists professed to do, that normative principles were irrelevant to the socialist movement, that, since the movement was of oppressed people fighting for their own liberation, there was no room or need for specifically moral inspiration in it. I thought no such thing partly for the plain reason that I observed enormous selfless dedication among the active communists who surrounded me in my childhood, and partly for the more sophisticated reason that the self-interest of any oppressed producer would tell him to stay at home, rather than to risk his neck in a revolution whose success or failure would be anyhow unaffected by his participation in it. Revolutionary workers and, a fortiori, bourgeois fellow-travellers without a particular material interest in socialism, must perforce be morally inspired.”

Gerald Cohen (1941–2009) Canadian philosopher

G. A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom, and Equality https://books.google.com/books?id=oeUQjOLNY-wC&pg=PA3 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3

People, Home, Failure, Success

Quotes about travel page 4

Quotes about travel
page 4