Quotes to inspire and reflect

Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.

Peace does not rest in charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of the people.

History is a pathetic junkyard of broken treaties.

The treason pleases, but the traitors are odious.

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

To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings. I am no longer of ye—what ye say of me is now of no consequence.

If one’s object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York; there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.

To forget pain is to be painless; to forget care is to be rid of it; to go abroad is to accomplish both.

Niagara Falls is very nice. I’m very glad I saw it, because from now on if I am asked whether I have seen Niagara Falls I can say yes, and be telling the truth for once.

I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.

When I was at home, I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.

The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral

Those who pass their lives in foreign travel find they contract many ties of hospitality, but form no friendships.

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

My heart is warm with the friends I make, / And better friends I’ll not be knowing; /Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, / No matter where it’s going.

A tourist is an ugly human being.

[EJvery native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this.

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

I don’t much care where I am anymore, nor expect very much from places.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

Men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby,—so helpless and so ridiculous.

To roam / Giddily, and be everywhere but at home, /.Such freedom doth a banishment become.

Why do the wrong people travel, travel, travel,AVhen the right people stay back home?

Road, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

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 to understand each other, we may even become friends.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever / From creation to decay, / Like the bubbles on a river / Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon / Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon, / Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face, / Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.

We are things of a day. What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream / is man, no more.

Ambition is a meteor-gleam; / Fame a restless airy dream; / Pleasures, insects on the wing / Round Peace, th’ tend’rest flow’r of spring.

Our lives ... are but a little while, / so let them run as sweetly as you can, / and give no thought to grief from day to day. / For time is not concerned to keep our hopes, / but hurries on its business, and is gone.

Tranquillity! thou better name /(Than all the family of Fame.

Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full / Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

Calm's not life’s crown, though calm is well.

A man can seldom—very, very, seldom—fight a winning fight against his training: the odds are too heavy.

It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.

Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.