10 Best Cappuccino Travel Quotes
Need a little inspiration? Look no further.
There are few things we like better here at Cappuccino than a good travel quote. Are travel quotes often misattributed, transposed on top of silly beach photos, and then splooged all over Instagram? Absolutely. Are travel quotes an excuse for not doing your own thinking? You betcha. And yet these sins, as damning as they are, cannot deter me from stuffing them inside my inflatable cheek pouches like a squirrel hoarding acorns. The Notes app on my iPhone is chockful of quotable wisdom.
And I drew from it as I struggled with my 2014 decision to let go of the branch and sail down the river move to Italy. I borrowed heavily from the courage of those who went before. That said, I invite you to take whatever courage and wisdom you need from me. Shabby and careworn as they are, I offer them to you.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” Whatever that is, whatever that looks like, I encourage you to do it. Not because it looks good on Instagram. But because the courage it takes to do the hard thing, the uncomfortable thing, whether taking a moral high ground or a trip across the planet, forges your character like fire forges steel.
There are no chains softer than comfort and ease. Shake them loose, and will see what you are really made of.
“I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.” ~ Mary Anne Radmacher
“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book, or you take a trip, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.” ~ Anais Nin
“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” ~ Gustave Flaubert
“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” ~ Anthony Bourdain
“Cover the earth before it covers you.” ~ Dagobert D. Runes
“It’s a funny thing coming home. Nothing changes. Everything looks the same, feels the same, even smells the same. You realize what’s changed is you.” ~ Eric Roth
“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
“But that's the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don't want to know what people are talking about. I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.” ~ Bill Bryson
“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.” ~ Jack Kerouac
“I feel about travel the way a happy new mother feels about her impossible, colicky, restless, newborn baby--I just don't care what it puts me through. Because I adore it. Because it's mine.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert
What are your favorite quotes—about anything? Like I said, I love borrowed wisdom, so lay it on me. Leave your comments below.
Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
More than anyone, I’ve always felt that Bourdain always grasped the essence and raison d’ etre of travel. It’s like throwing a pebble in the ocean. The waves move outward and change everything they touch. So, too, with travel. We change those we meet and are changed by them. Hopefully for the better.
Person #1: "Let's face it, we're lost."
Person #2: "Yeah, but we're making great time."
I suppose my favorite remains, "We're not in Kansas any more." I've actually had occasion to use that one. For instance, in an open-top double-decker bus on the banks of the Liffy, heading into downtown Dublin, a kid with a mohawk rockin' out on his earphones in the seat in front of me, a 12th C. cathedral to my left, a 21st C city hall to my right on the opposite bank, the Guinness distribution warehouse just behind with barrels stacked at least 12' high. And me, just nodding and looking around, and thinking, "Yup. Definitely not Kansas." (In contrast, there was the week I spent in Topeka one afternoon.)
I don't know if it counts as a travel quote, but the opening line to Isak Dinesen's "Out of Africa" has always haunted me: "I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong hills." Of course, what makes that line so striking is all that comes after it. (And Meryl Streep's delivery certainly helps.)